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"How Far We Have Come" Sermon preached by John C. Hall on
November 5, 2006 All of us who are here today are a unique congregation, a unique combination of people. Last Sunday, there was a slightly different group here. Next week, there will be different group. But today, we are the congregation of First Church. And the fact of our being here can be traced back through a long chain and events to a group of English Puritan settlers who came from England to Boston, Boston to Hartford, and Hartford to this place, at the great bend in the river. This was a good place to graze sheep. That was in 1650, 356 years ago. Where those settlers built their houses, how they worshiped, how they lived — this set in motion a long chain of events that led to Middletown, and this church, today. Who were the Puritans? Puritans came to the colonies from England to get away from the Church of England and to establish a society that followed what they considered the right way of being Christian. Puritans started out wanting to purify the Church of England, but they ended up leaving it. They didn’t come here for religious freedom as we understand it. They didn’t come here so that people of different religions could live together in peace. That came later, as a compromise they were forced to accept, grudgingly. They came to set up a society where everyone would have the same religion. Mostly likely, these Puritan settlers came down the river from Hartford on boats or rafts. Their decision to build a meetinghouse was made in the home of John Hall, at the present corner of Main and Washington Streets. John Hall is a name that catches my ear. He was my great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great uncle. That first meeting house was a log cabin. Around the cabin they built a stockade as a defense against the “savages” as they called native inhabitants. They didn’t use any musical instruments in worship. That was not “Puritan.” They sang the psalms from the Geneva Bible, which was the only proper Bible. If we could go back and talk to them, we would hear a form of English and an accent that would be hard to understand, and I suspect we would find their ideas about religions and government to be rigid. They made a sharp distinction between genuinely converted Christians, the “elect” — people who had what they considered a true experience of God’s grace and salvation, and the rest of the people, the unwashed, unconverted, who’d had no such conversion experience. The Puritan, Congregational way, for them, was the one true way. Even the Anglicans were considered impure, because they were too similar to Roman Catholics. Things like stained glass windows, vestments, and crosses, architecture, and bishops were considered forms of idolatry. Religion was a very serious matter, a passionate matter, and a matter of life and death. If you read diaries from the time, you get the impression that everything good was seen as God’s direct providence and care or reward, and everything bad, all adversity, was God’s care in the form of chastisement or punishment. The culture was saturated with God. And one way I understand that obsession with God is that life here in the 17th century was very harsh, dangerous, and exhausting. Death was just around the corner for everyone. New England winters were colder and snowier then. There was no central heating, not even wood stoves yet. People had small fires in their cabins for cooking, probably something like you can see today at the re-creation of Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts. They carried water from springs. Spring Street in the North End of Middletown is a reminder that. For food, they relied on their own crops and animals. There wasn’t even much trading in the 1650s. The economy was very local. They were subsistence farmers. So there weren’t a lot of visitors coming to town. That way of life slowly changed. Trade increased. At one point in the 18th century, Middletown was the busiest seaport between NY and Boston. The trade was welcomed, but then those Anglicans started moving in too. There goes the neighborhood. Religious conversions became less frequent. The former religious zeal cooled off. And, here we are today. You’re a part of what that process led to. If they could see us now, they probably wouldn’t recognize us as related to them in any way. Look at this place. We’ve got stained glass windows — an abomination in Puritan eyes. We’ve got a huge organ. We sing hymns that aren’t straight from the Bible. I’m wearing these Papist-looking vestments. We take religious diversity for granted. We embrace it. But there are some threads of continuity. We’ve all had to deal with a changing world. A church can’t afford to change too fast or we lose everyone. You can’t hold people together if nothing is settled and everything is open to question. So, how do we strike a balance between convictions, tradition, stability on the one hand, and the need to be open and flexible on the other hand? Every church has this dilemma. We need to evolve fast enough to keep up with the culture. We need to use email, for example. But we can’t evolve too fast. We can’t have just on-line or streaming video worship services that people watch at home on their computers. That won’t work. Some place of stability, and community, and a sense of “sanctuary” from the culture is a major thing the church offers. We all need to change, but we’re also threatened by too much change, too fast. The Puritans certainly felt that. Another thing we have in common with them is the question: Who is Jesus Christ? After all these centuries, we still call Christ the “head of the church.” In the Covenant of 1668 that we recited, we read the words, “The Government of Christ.” Who was that Jewish peasant, Jesus? Where did he come from? What light does he bring? What difference does he make? This question is always at the heart of the church. But there is no single, permanent, way of being a church, frozen in time. The church is a process. The church is always getting mixed up with the culture around us. The church serves as a sanctuary from the culture, but the culture also follows us here. It’s in us. Like our messy, personal stories that I talked about last week, the church is never pure in any sense. And here’s where the Ruth story fits in perfectly. Ruth is a foreigner. She’s not a Jew. She enters the Jewish story from the outside, promising her mother-in-law Naomi in those touching words: “Where you go, I will go; your people will be my people; your God my God; where you die, I will die.” Ruth changed tribes. She changed cultures. And she became a part of the Christian story by being one of Jesus’ ancestors. If Jesus is the rock on which we stand, it’s a rock made from an odd mixture of elements. The church has always been a mixture. Or, shifting from geology for a moment … As you know, I like dog metaphors for the church. We have this idea of a pure church. But some stray mongrel is always digging under the fence messing up our breeding plans. The world is always pressing us to change? How much should we change? What is God doing with us as a congregation? What is God doing with your own life? Where is it all leading?
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| First Church of Christ, Congregational United Church of Christ 190 Court Street Middletown, CT 860-346-6657 |
Sunday Worship at 10 a.m. Child Care Provided An "Open & Affirming Church" Directions to First Church |
