What Do We Anticipate
The following is the text I used during a sermon on 11/27/22:
Good morning everyone, Happy New Year, it’s great to be back here at Imagine. I’ve gotta say, the last couple times I was asked to speak here it was with somewhat short notice, so it was nice to have a couple months this time to get ready, or at least it would have been if I’d known what I was gonna talk about.
Because let me tell you, it has been an experience trying to get this sermon written - we’re on at least the fourth or fifth version, and a lot of the reason why starts with the question that might be on most of your minds - did he just say Happy New Year? Does anyone know what today is? (actually solicit response).
Today is the first day of Advent, which is the first day of the church calendar in traditions that follow the church calendar. Real quick, I won’t give you a diagram or anything, but in the church year there are 6 primary seasons: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is new to you; I had to go work at a Lutheran church camp to learn about it. The important point for us here is that each season has its own flow, focus, themes, etc.
So I had the thought that it could be interesting to talk about Advent and its theme, which is the anticipation of the coming of Jesus. Writing about anticipation seemed easy enough, because I’m going through a lot of anticipation right now. For example, I’m getting married in 33 days - believe me, I’m steeped in anticipation.
But as it turns out, I can’t seem to do anything the easy way, especially when I have about two hours of thoughts that I get 25 minutes to talk through, or realistically 30 minutes if I’m lucky, so we’re gonna try to go with something we’ll call “anticipation-adjacent,” but at this point I think the only way I can really approach today is a sermon that is much more testimonial in nature, sharing some of my recent experiences, than my typical heady, academic type sermon…and all the people said amen.
So with that, I’ll pray for us here, and then get ready to buckle up and we’ll see where we go.
Lord, we come before you this morning and thank you for giving us today. We praise you for your presence here, for your existence here on Earth, and we ask for eyes to see and ears to hear this morning as we await your coming once more. Speak through me this morning and make your message clear, either because or in spite of me. Amen
So we’re gonna start this sermon at the end, or more accurately in the present, instead of at the beginning. About a month and a half ago I got a new job, and more than 6 years after graduating from seminary, it’s finally something related to what I went to school for. I am now the communications coordinator for an organization called Transform Minnesota, which serves a network of evangelical churches across the state by helping church leaders engage complex issues from a biblical perspective. That means I’m basically doing a bunch of creative stuff that’s so far up my alley it’s incredible and I can’t believe it’s real. But more important to our story at the moment is the event that I was helping promote right when I started my job, a workshop called “Jesus in the Secular World,” which discussed cultural changes in the United States and the trend of people migrating away from organized religion in general, and from Christianity in particular.
Now for me, when I hear a statement like “culture is changing and people are leaving the Church,” I always wonder if it’s actually happening, or if someone just feels like it’s happening. But it is being seen and tracked statistically, especially among the Millennial and Gen Z generations. More and more there’s a group of people who have two specific things in common: 1, they’re defining themselves as “religiously unaffiliated,” meaning they don’t identify with any organized religion - not necessarily atheist, but perhaps a-religious; and 2, they’re becoming less trusting of and more antagonistic to the Church as a broad organization, seeing it as a place full of hypocrisy and irrelevant to their lives.
I realize those are strong words to hear, but I need you to let them sink in, because as I interacted with the research I was starting to see pieces of my own story in lots of different places, and was encountering a lot of similar questions that I’ve asked about the Church.
One of the ways this overall culture change is being identified is the term “post-Christian.” There is a way in which our culture as a country was nominally Christian, and now we are in a period after that. But there’s a smaller group inside of this larger religiously unaffiliated group which was more than nominally Christian, a group that was raised in the church and has since left for any number of reasons, a group which has come to be identified with another term: they deconstructed.
As I was writing this, I had this image in my mind of the violin sound effect from Psycho playing (I don’t even know how to write that - rie-rie-rie), because it seems like that’s how that buzzword has come to be portrayed in some places. Like it’s a scary, “oh no, the young people are deconstructing, how could they leave the church?” situation. And like many issues, I see a conversation here that feels far too simplistic.
Now, I may not be able to speak with authority to the personal experience of everyone who’s deconstructed, but I can speak about this with some firsthand awareness, because if you’ll remember I said that there was a six year period between graduating from seminary and getting this new job, and after a lot of reflection I realized I had my own deconstruction journey in that time. And yes, for those keeping track on your scorecards, this is where we get to the testimonial portion of the sermon.
So, a lot of people go to seminary to become a pastor, but I knew I didn’t want to be a pastor, that I didn’t feel like that was my call. My call to seminary felt far more like a continuation of the work I’d done in college; I wanted to study issues of race and justice from a biblical perspective. I didn’t go to school with a specific job in mind, but I did anticipate that, not only would there be a job available to me at the end of it, but that God would have lined up that job, and it would be clear where I was supposed to go next.
I didn’t feel like I’d gone to school just because I wanted to, but truly because I wanted to follow what I believed was God’s will. I could not get away from feeling a need to be in some sort of ministry engaging evangelicals about justice, and after being in school I thought that would happen through political advocacy.
The problem I ran into, in a lot of ways, was graduating in 2016. Yes, fast mental math from a lot of you. A very interesting time to try to start engaging white evangelicals in conversations about race. When I tell you I couldn’t find a job, I mean, anything…there were so many times where I was just like, “am I not looking in the right place? Am I not searching for the right job titles? Is there something I’m missing?” And then eventually, “Is there something about me?” I had this frustration that really started to grow over time, and not just because I couldn’t find a job; it was that I’d been anticipating that there’d be a job for me as part of God’s will. And suddenly I was questioning what God’s will was.
I have heard, from sources outside my own personal experience, that we’ve had a generation, or perhaps more, that was raised to believe some things about God that aren’t true. There are probably a lot, but I want to think about three of these today in particular. First, we had a belief or expectation presented to us that God is there to reward us by giving us something. It doesn’t matter how much we were told otherwise; that’s the message that was modeled and conveyed. We would hear talks or sermons or teachings about how God wasn’t a “cosmic Santa Claus” or “cosmic vending machine,” and then we’d hear people almost exclusively share prayer requests for stuff or experiences or whatever they felt God was there to give them.
A second message that was conveyed hand-in-hand with the first was that God, or the Church, exists exclusively to make us feel better. Get away from the negative and bring in the positive. This is where I can say personally that it felt like, rather than being shown how to experience pain, we were taught that if we had enough God in our lives he would take away pain, or any other negative experience or emotion you want to switch in there.
Third, there was this expectation or message conveyed that we, in some way, should be able to connect with God well enough on our own for the first two things to happen. Sure there’s a group of people that can give you support in the Church, or maybe you could find some support in your friend group, but when it comes down to it, there’s this feeling that if things are going negatively and aren’t changing, there is something wrong with you, which over time you start to believe is the reason why it feels like God isn’t coming through for you, isn’t seeing you, or is becoming further separated from you.
So these are the things playing in my head as I’m going through my job search, though I wasn’t necessarily aware of them at the time. I went from a summer job, to a temp job, to another temp job, to loading trucks at UPS, with no movement towards where I thought I had a calling. I’d wake up at like 1:30 in the morning to go to work, drive home at like 9:30, and go to bed before 6 so I could start the cycle over again, barely seeing anyone else during that free time. I tried to spend the time I had focusing on finding a new job or studying, but more often spent it trying to numb my pain. I was looking for any way out of what felt like a growing isolation, full of what I referred to as “the darkness,” and I’d find myself just screaming at God, sometimes in my head, sometimes out loud, “What am I doing?” At the same time, I’d look around the world in 2016 and 2017 at the way the white evangelical Church wasn’t responding to the issues that I had just spent years studying, issues that I felt were integral to faith, and I’d scream at God in desperation: “What are we doing?”
At this point someone might ask, “well did you turn to anyone for help?” And the answer is that I sure felt like I did, in the way I was able to at the time, but it felt like I would either get someone who was in a very similar boat and had no answers, or someone whose advice felt very “Self-Helpianity,” as a former ministry coworker would say: advice that, while well intentioned, made it feel like I was on my own to solve the problems that led to the darkness in the first place.
This is how my deconstruction began, and I think it’s how many begin. Deconstruction doesn’t feel like a choice. It comes out of crisis. Your belief system doesn’t match your experience, and you need to figure out why. You feel like something is wrong with you, and it leads to so many questions.
There’s a Psalm I reencountered somewhat recently that I think expresses some of these feelings, that I connected with almost viscerally when I encountered it. Psalm 13 is a Psalm of David where we see him reflecting on a period of darkness and despair, especially in verses 1-4:
How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
2 How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?
3 Look on me and answer, Lord my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death,
4 and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”
and my foes will rejoice when I fall.
He repeats, over and over: How long, Lord? How long must I wrestle? How long? HOW LONG?! How much sorrow? How much pain? How much darkness? The phrase in verse one, “How long will you hide your face from me?” is used throughout the Psalms to indicate that God is angry with his people. It is as though David is expressing his belief that his experiences are because God is angry at him.
Interacting with these first 4 four verses, I was tracking the whole way; “yes, Yes, YES!” My pain, my questions, right there. But then, David gets to the last two verses of the Psalm:
5 But I trust in your unfailing love;
my heart rejoices in your salvation.
6 I will sing the Lord’s praise,
for he has been good to me.
And I looked at that then, and even still I look at it, and I’m just like, “HOW?” How, in the darkness of 1-4, after years of feeling the darkness, can you still get 5 and 6?
Sitting in the darkness, trying to figure out where to go, it really felt like there was an expectation, real or perceived, that I had to get myself from 1-4 to 5 and 6. It felt like the only acceptable way to ask the question of “How” out loud was to answer immediately either “with God’s help” with no road map as to how to obtain or accept that help, or with a Shia LaBoeuf “JUST DO IT” response. Because it felt like there was an aversion to even being allowed to question my belief structure and why things were the way they were personally and corporately.
And I need to tell you, when you have been sitting in the darkness, looking at a religion that you’re beginning to, or are very deep in the midst of questioning without finding answers, that is where you start thinking about walking away, because the framework just isn’t matching up with real life, and it isn’t providing or acting as the balm you were told it’s supposed to be.
To this point, there’s a song my fiancee and I heard in a church service recently called He's Able. A little different from a similar song we sang this morning. There aren’t really a lot of lyrics; for the most part, you get the entire song in this one verse:
Exceedingly, Abundantly
Above all, all you could ask or think
According to, the power
That worketh in you, you...
God is able to do just what he said he would do
He's gonna fulfill every promise to you
Don't give up on god, cause he won't give up on you
He's able
And in the service we were in, the worship leader was doing a thing some worship leaders do, where she was filling space and vamping on the lyrics, trying to add emphasis to the message of the song. And she was really going in on the lyrics: don’t give up on God, don’t you give up on God, don’t you dare give up on God.
I’ll be honest and say that I was not paying attention when this was happening live, but my fiancee brought it up in conversation a week later, and she shared with me how she wished there had been a tweak to that message. Because for someone who is in a place where they feel their hope fading or failing, hearing that message so focused on “don’t you, don’t you, don’t you” could feel like condemnation, or even a threat. How could you dare give up on God? And the answer, from my shoes and the shoes of many others, is “I didn’t want to!”
This line of thought, this felt isolation and condemnation, is something I think can and does drive people away from the Church. There is a way in which the Church can feel like a hostile environment when it is geared toward a positive sort of experience that doesn’t match your own, and when it is geared in such a way that it feels like asking any questions feels like you are posing a threat.
As I was putting this sermon together and reflecting on everything I just shared, a thought came to mind: I wonder if we’re afraid of questions. Like, not just us in this room, but are we evangelical Christians afraid of questions that sound like doubt in someone’s faith.
That thought led me to another passage, that of “doubting Thomas,” and reflecting on how I’ve heard that passage taught.
In John 20, John records a number of things related to the resurrection of Jesus, one being the experience of the apostle Thomas. Thomas was one of the disciples of Jesus, part of the group of 12 who were the closest of Jesus’ followers. Jesus appeared to the disciples after he died and was raised from the dead, but John records that the first appearance, for some reason, didn’t include Thomas. When Thomas returned to the group and was told of Jesus’ appearance, Thomas is recorded as saying “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” And then John records Jesus appearing to the group a week later with Thomas present. Jesus goes to Thomas and says, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” Thomas then says to him, “My Lord and my God!” To which Jesus replies, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
I think a lot of us experienced the teaching of this story as an example of who not to be. The virtue that was taught was belief without seeing, and it felt like any sort of doubt would corrupt that virtue. Doubt was to be avoided to preserve the virtue of faith. So I wonder here, when someone starts asking questions which sound like doubting the faith, how many Christians feel like there is a threat they need to extinguish rather than engage because they fear those questions could bring doubt into their own minds, thus leading to some sort of corruption.
But I want to think about the story with more depth. Thomas is an interesting example here because he has become so identified with this story that he has taken on the name “doubting Thomas.” His doubt has become a part of his identity for us. The problem is, when this is all we see, we miss two very important points.
First, if we only see Thomas as a doubter, we fail to see the faith of Thomas, how in John 11 he was prepared to go and die with Jesus. We fail to see the Thomas who church tradition tells us was the first to go and evangelize India in the first century. We fail to see how someone who doubts can be used so strongly in the kingdom of God.
There are so many examples where this is true of people inside of Christianity, but I think it can also be true of people who have left Christianity. I went to a concert a couple years ago for a band that had just deconstructed and left the faith. It’s a band you’ll probably be familiar with if you’ve been around churches for a while, one whose reputation I’m sure could be questionable for some of you here and for many evangelicals elsewhere, and is one of the reasons I asked if Beautiful Things could be played today. It was a band called Gungor. This concert I went to was part of their “End of the World” tour, their last in this formation as this band playing all the songs that they had written as Christians. I drove to Chicago with my sister to see it, because I liked them and the other artists they were touring with, and I don’t know where they are now, but it seemed at the time like it was going to be a pretty firm, pretty certain end for the band.
I went into that show knowing that there were people there, probably a pretty significant number, who weren’t Christian, were no longer Christian, who claim Christ but have beliefs we’d probably say don’t reflect Christ, with so many people in the venue that I was literally standing sideways in the middle of the floor, perpendicular to the stage, and I can’t begin to describe to you how much it felt like there was real, deep worship of God in that place that night. Worship experiences for so much of my life have been so hard for me to connect to, but this was one of the strongest feelings of being connected to worship I’ve ever felt.
See, there’s another piece to the conversation I had with my fiancee about the song I mentioned before, He’s Able. There is a truth for people who have deconstructed, a truth that my fiancee pointed to that she’d wanted the worship leader to express. And that is that even if you have given up on God, if your questions and doubts have led you to give up on him and the Church, no matter what your experience, God still hasn’t and will never give up on you. He isn’t waiting for you to come back; He is with you. Even if you’re far from God, you can still meet God. He wasn’t waiting for Gungor to come back; He was there. He didn’t wait for Thomas to come back; He went to him where he was.
If you are currently deconstructing, or you have deconstructed, I do hope that is a belief you can come to. God truly can make beautiful things out of us. But my message here is actually to those who should be walking alongside you. There is an entire group who should be walking in solidarity alongside people who are deconstructing, working through that pain in a way that is proximate, and we can go back to the story of Thomas for the reason why.
We don’t have a lot of detail about the week in between Jesus’ appearances, so we can’t know for sure what the mood was like among the disciples with Thomas’ doubt. But what we do see is that, when Jesus appears again, Thomas is with the group. He has been included with the disciples even while he was in his doubt. Thomas didn’t have to get over his doubt alone in order to be welcomed and included.
Which leads to the second thing we can learn from the story. The first point we saw from the story of Thomas was that if we only see Thomas as a doubter, we would fail to see everything else he was. The second point is that if we see only Thomas as a doubter, we fail to see how all of the other disciples also had doubts. You can look at every account of Jesus’ resurrection and see that disciples ran to the tomb to see if He really was gone. You can look throughout the book of John and see points where Jesus does something, and then the disciples believe. You can look throughout scripture and see over and over how people had an expectation or anticipation of who God was, and then had to work through questions and doubts about what they thought they believed in order to deconstruct what was false and build what is true.
“Deconstruction” is typically thought of as rejecting Christianity and leaving the church. But deconstructing what is false and building what is true is something I think we all need to think about.
It’s fair to say that my own deconstruction did not lead to fully rejecting Christianity, or walking away from God. It was more of a deconstruction “lite,” if you will: same taste, less filling. But I know that the journey is not over. I’m still working through Psalm 13, learning how to continue to praise God, and also learning whether I’m putting my hope in the God we are to anticipate or whether I still believe God’s primary role is to give me something and that he finally came through with a job for me after 6 years.
I’ll try to wrap us up with this: at the event I mentioned that I was helping to promote with my new job, the speaker made a comment about how we will not reach out or go to people who have left or aren’t interested in coming to the Church until our heart is broken, because the extent to which our heart is broken is the extent we’re going to do something about it. I have a broken heart for those who have deconstructed in part because I have felt their pain. But I also have a broken heart for the parts of the Church which do or believe things that contribute to others leaving.
I think there are a lot of people who deconstructed and left the Church because they saw people holding fast to beliefs that aren’t biblical and refusing to engage the possibility something needed to be corrected. They saw a church worshiping a God who congratulated good people rather than a God who seeks and walks with and hurts with the lost. I think the failure to deconstruct these beliefs, especially the beliefs that God is solely there to give us something and take away our pain if we have enough faith, hurts our witness. We must build relationships and engage the questions we encounter, and work together to come before the real Christ we are to anticipate.