The Fifth Sunday after Trinity (July 4, 2021)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord our strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

Church history is a tumultuous topic. It’s easy for us to take for granted the fact that certain things are the way they are; but most progress made by the Church has occurred in circumstances where it wasn’t always evident that the Church would thrive. What seems straightforward to us, namely that the heretics lost and the orthodox, catholic faith prevailed was not always so clear. To study earlier generations of Christians is to become aware of very serious assaults against the Church.

And there have been times when it appeared like the orthodox and catholic faith wouldn’t survive these assaults, whether they were from other religions, hostile governments, or heretical sects. We can think of the Saint Athanasius, whose work On the Incarnation we read at our Friday study towards the end of this school year. Athanasius was a bishop in Alexandria, Egypt in the 4th century who vigorously opposed the heresy of Arianism which stated that Christ was not “of the same substance” as the Father but rather was an exulted creature who was adopted by God. While much of Athanasius’ work was used by the Council of Nicaea, from which we get the Nicene Creed, in his own lifetime, he was exiled 5 times for being opposed to Arianism. I would argue that a study of Church History is, in many ways, a study of providence and a study of God’s faithfulness in spite of external pressures and even our own disobedience.

Fast forward to the present moment here in the modern, Western Church: things aren’t dire in terms of external persecutions, we can ask our brothers and sisters elsewhere in the world about that. However, we do face serious challenges. Rather than be extinguished from the outside through force, the American Church risks deconstructing itself through capitulation, rot, and impotence. According to a Pew study, in 2020, less than 50% of people identify as a member of a Church, synagogue, or mosque. It’s not just a problem with millennials, either. Since 2000, 9% of Baby Boomers and 12% of Generation X have stopped attending as well. This decline has been paralleled by a sharp increase of the “nones”, those who, statistically believe in a god, but do not identify with a particular religion. For perspective, in 2009, 17% of people identified as nones while in 2019, just 10 years later, 26% of people so identified. you can compare that to the sharp decline over the same time period of people un-identyfing as Christian: in 2009, we had 77% and now self-identified Christians are about 65%. Further, in 2017, a LifeWay Research study found that 66% of college students who were raised in the Church stopped attending church for a significant amount of time.

Why the decline? Well, for one, we could point to increasing secularization: Christianity should be an organizing principle for how we live our lives but we have made it merely one option competing in the marketplace of ideas. Further, Enlightenment and modernistic ways of thinking have infiltrated virtually every Christian tradition in the West in different ways. Some churches have jettisoned biblical and Catholic principles for the spirit of the age while others have embraced an unhelpful kind of fundamentalism that leaves them ill-equipped to engage with the questions being raised by our culture. Further, in some parts of the Church, people are being driven out by unchristian behavior, whether it’s an over-saturation of the political in the Church or toxic leadership styles. We are, of course, aware of the crisis in the Roman Catholic Church of abusive priests but we’re finding this is a more common occurrence in other traditions, as well, as one can see based on recent news coming out of the Southern Baptist Convention. Christianity Today has recently released an interesting podcast called Who Killed Mars Hill? about the well-known Evangelical pastor Mark Driscoll and the collapse of his church, Mars Hill, that had an average Sunday attendance of 12,329 until it was disbanded in light of revelations about his toxic behavior.

It’s easy, when looking at the trajectories, to fall into 2 different temptations. The first is the temptation to lose hope. Less young people going to Church and instead being catechized by the larger culture means we will experience contractions in coming decades. It would be easy to give into despair. The other temptation is that we might take it upon ourselves to fix it by looking in the wrong places: voting for the right politicians, or pushing a particular political party’s agenda so we can “go back to the good old days.” Unfortunately, neither of those solutions is really sufficient. We can’t lose hope so long as we have the God we have. And we can’t cast our lots with or be overly wed to the political lest we compromise the tenants of our faith for lesser goods. So what is the answer? It’s here I think today’s readings are helpful.

In St. Luke 5, Jesus gets in the boat owned by Simon Peter to teach a crown of people that were “pressed upon him to hear the word of God.” When he’s done with his teaching, he instructs Peter, whose feast day we celebrated this past week, to cast their nets into the deep. While Peter initially objects, saying “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing,” he nevertheless obeys. And that obedience leads to success: they catch so many fish that the nets break. So they call over another boat. Eventually, they end up with so much fish both boats start to sink. Peter’s response to this great occurrence is to fall down and exclaim, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” The sign Jesus has shown them is sufficient for Peter to believe and he knows he’s not worthy. It is here that Jesus commissions Peter, James, and John, “Do not be afraid; henceforth, you will be catching men.”

This reading is many things: it’s the story of a miracle, the commissioning of the early disciples, etc. but, perhaps mostly, it is an allegory about the Church. Peter’s boat symbolizes the Church of the Apostles which is built on and promulgates the teachings of our Lord. I never get tired of pointing out that the place in the church where the congregation sits is called the nave, which comes from the Latin word for boat. And that Christ gets in Peter’s boat shows his enduring presence in the Church. That the Apostles are sent to fish corresponds to the Great Commission Jesus gives the Disciples as he’s ascending to heaven at the end of Matthew: that they would go into all the world to preach the Gospel and make disciples by baptizing them. St. Ambrose, who lived from 340-397 and whose preaching is responsible for the conversion of St. Augustine, says its fitting that the fishermen used nets because nets don’t kill the fish but keeps them safe and brings to regions above — this is the task of the Church: to speak words of life, not death. The lack of success the disciples had the previous night before Jesus was present points to what happens when we try and accomplish the Church’s mission through pure human ingenuity, charisma, eloquence, or other supposedly self-sufficient means. Instead, we fulfill the tasks we are given through the grace imparted to us by the various means Christ has given the Church. The great success of the fishermen can be read as a picture of the Early Church per Acts where the responses to Apostolic preaching were overwhelming. One needs only to consider Pentecost where we’re told 3,000 souls converted because they heard the Gospel proclaimed. But, we can also read their success as a negative: the fish do start to sink the boats. St. Augustine read this part of the story as an exhortation to remain in the Church even when it is weighted down by vice and other shortcomings. And finally, we can read the confession of St. Peter, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord,” and the encouraging response he receives from our Lord as a foreshadowing of the Sacrament of Confession in which we receive grace even after we have sinned. As St. Ambrose states, “See how good the Lord is, who gives so much to men.”

So how do we apply this story to where we find ourselves today? First, we can disabuse ourselves of the following notions:

First, that church growth, both qualitative and quantitive is primarily because of programs, charismatic pastors, or any other human thing we can come up with. Certainly, churches that introduce various kinds of gimmicks might experience a kind of temporary success but statistics show those kinds of churches have high turnover among membership because they don’t feed souls the way people need to be fed over the long term.

A second principle we should disavow is that Church growth is somehow dependent on political battles. While certainly legal and political battles are important, they’re also often downstream from culture. So we can’t be dependent on politicians or judges or whoever else to grow the Churches for us. It’s one of the great paradoxes of Christian history that when the Church is persecuted, it tends to thrive the most.

So I think there are a few positive takeaways from our reading today that do prescribe how we should respond to our current cultural crisis and they can all be summarized simply by saying: “The Church should be the Church.”

We should be about the business of preaching the Gospel and teaching the Word. We need to break out the nets so we can participate in the episcopal responsibility of evangelism. And this is much harder and deeper than simply buying tracts and leaving them with waiters instead of a tip (which we should really never do); it involves building relationships with people who are different from us, and truly loving them. It means sharing with them the beauty of holiness rather than the ugliness of strife.

We also ought to pray. As Anglicans, we’re equipped well for this task given that we have the beautiful Book of Common Prayer, the Anglican Breviary, the Missal, and other prayerful practices. The key thing about prayer is that it’s about listening just as much as it is about speaking. Are we attune to what God says to us in our liturgy and the Scriptures?

A third thing we should be about is making our confession. Just as St. Peter acknowledges his unworthiness before our Lord, so we acknowledge our unworthiness as a part of our liturgy and also in the privacy of the confessional. By making a regular confession, we become more keenly aware that the power lies not in us but in our Lord. And so when we receive grace from confession, we need to use it to seek reconciliation and healing.

The fourth, final, and most significant thing the Church needs to do to be the Church is to organize itself around the Mass. All the other things we should be doing, the Gospel, prayer, and confession, are all dependent on the mystery at the heart of our faith: Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again. This mystery is replayed for us each week during the Mass as the sacrifice made by our Lord on the cross becomes present for us when we receive his Body and Blood and we anticipate that great Wedding Supper of the Lamb that awaits us at the consummation of all things.

If we are to survive as the Church, we must be the Church. We must cling to the promise of Christ that he would send us a Counselor, the Holy Ghost, who will protect the Church and guide her into all truth. Just as ancient Israel was forbidden from making alliances with the nations for protection lest they credit their safety to other countries instead of God, we, as the Church, shouldn’t look to political parties, church programs, or any other human invention, but to our Lord. All human institutions will fail eventually. But if we take this morning’s readings seriously, we come to the realization that the Church is not a human institution; but a divine one. And, as a result, we can have great confidence that “the gates of hell will not prevail against her.”

Let us pray: O GRACIOUS Father, we humbly beseech thee for thy holy Catholic Church; that thou wouldest be pleased to fill it with all truth, in all peace. Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it is in error, direct it; where in any thing it is amiss, reform it. Where it is right, establish it; where it is in want, provide for it; where it is divided, reunite it; for the sake of him who died and rose again, and ever liveth to make intercession for us, Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord. Amen.