Difference between revisions of "Sermon for October 13th, 2024"

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2 Chronicles 34:29-33

29 Then the king sent word and gathered together all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem. 30 The king went up to the house of the Lord, with all the people of Judah, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the priests and the Levites, all the people both great and small; he read in their hearing all the words of the book of the covenant that had been found in the house of the Lord. 31 The king stood in his place and made a covenant before the Lord, to follow the Lord, keeping his commandments, his decrees, and his statutes, with all his heart and all his soul, to perform the words of the covenant that were written in this book. 32 Then he made all who were present in Jerusalem and in Benjamin pledge themselves to it. And the inhabitants of Jerusalem acted according to the covenant of God, the God of their ancestors. 33 Josiah took away all the abominations from all the territory that belonged to the people of Israel and made all who were in Israel serve the Lord their God. All his days they did not turn away from following the Lord the God of their ancestors.

American Reformations: The Great Awakening

Somewhere in a small town in the Midwest, three local churches--Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian--worked together to sponsor a community- wide revival. After the revival had concluded, the three pastors met for lunch, and were discussing the results with one another. The Methodist minister said, "The revival worked out great for us. We gained 4 new members, Hallelujah!" The Baptist preacher said, "Amen, brother, but we did better than that. We gained 6 new members, Praise the Lord!" The Presbyterian pastor said, "Well, we did even better than that! Thanks be to God, we finally got rid of our 10 biggest troublemakers!"

Today I’m going to talk about the 18th century revival movement in America known as the Great Awakening. But to get there, first we need to go back in time almost 3,000 years to Ancient Israel, or more specifically the Kingdom of Judah, and to our scripture passage from 2nd Chronicles. The King in today’s scripture passage is Josiah, who was probably the first great reformer in Judeo-Christian tradition. 2nd Chronicles tells how King Josiah discovered an ancient book of the law (probably the book of Deuteronomy) while making repairs to the temple in Jerusalem. He had the book read aloud in the presence of all his citizens, who then made a commitment to honor its commandments all of their days. This revival became a reformation when Josiah restructured the worship of the temple, the laws of the land, and his own royal court according to the newly rediscovered scriptures.

Fast forward about 700 years, and Josiah’s reforms have been so successful they are now the permanent law of the land in Jerusalem and Israel. They are followed strictly to the letter, even though many of the religious and government leaders seem to have forgotten what the laws were for in the first place. Worse yet, they have interpreted the laws with even more laws, so that it’s hard for anyone to be “righteous” in the eyes of God. Into this situation comes a carpenter’s son from Nazareth, who brings the people back to the “spirit” of the law, forgives them for their transgressions, and begins to draw crowds numbering in the thousands. The revival movement of Jesus spreads across the Mediterranean world, and in just a few short centuries becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire, known as Christianity.

Fast forward another 1,000 years plus change, and Christianity has spread all across Europe, but by now it’s just about as legalistic and spiritually dead as Jerusalem had been in the time of Jesus (or Josiah). The Medieval Roman Catholic Church sells indulgences (slips of paper forgiving people in advance for sins they are interested in potentially committing) in order to fund the building of lavish cathedrals and monasteries. The scriptures have effectively been lost again to all but the educated few who can still read Latin. Into this situation come the great 16th century reformers—Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, and others. They translate the Bible into the languages of the people, and they restructure their communities and their churches according to Biblical principles. Their movement is known (rather appropriately) as “The Reformation” and it spreads like wildfire all across Europe, giving birth to the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment in the process.

And the people of God lived happily ever after. The end. Roll the credits. Go home.

I’m just kidding, please don’t go home yet. But if you’ve been around here in October before—or as we call it, Reformation Heritage Month—you probably know that this is usually where we end the story. Because our church, like all Presbyterian and Reformed churches, is a product of the 16th century Reformation, and we like to think that after that one we finally got the message. No more reforms needed. We figured it all out, and we are no longer in danger of spiritually falling asleep again, or making the same mistakes as those who went before us.

But of course, that isn’t true. Even the 16th century Reformers knew this—that’s why one of their mottoes (and consequently our mottoes) was Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda Secundum Verbum Dei: The church reformed, and always to be reformed according to the Word of God.

So this week, and for the next two weeks, we’re actually going to continue the story, as Reformed, Protestant Christianity came across the Atlantic to America, and continued to be formed and reformed in almost every century, right down to the present time—but always according to the Word of God, and thanks to faithful men and women who answered God’s call.

In the early 18th century, the American colonies were pretty diverse when it came to religious belief. Not exactly the way we think of religious diversity today, but rather diversity in that there was no generally accepted, state sponsored church like there were in most European countries (Scotland was Presbyterian, Germany was Lutheran, Spain was Catholic, England was Anglican, etc.). The American colonies were a bit of everything: Puritan, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Quaker, Baptist, to name a few. I mentioned earlier that the 16th century Reformation in many ways laid the foundation for the 18th century Enlightenment. Those egalitarian, proto-scientific ideals also led to a kind of cold and rationalistic approach to faith. Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote his own synthesis of the Christian gospels, but took out all of the miracles. Most people believed in God, but many felt that God was remote, distant, a divine clock-maker who set things in motion but didn’t really intervene in people’s lives.

One of those was a young Yale University student named Jonathan Edwards. He wanted to be a scientist, and wrote about natural history, atomic theory, and observations on several species of spiders. But Edwards also studied the scriptures and believed that science and faith were two sides of the same coin. He wanted to be a faithful Christian, but felt that his faith (like his science) was entirely intellectual, not personal, not heartfelt.

And then he met Sarah Pierpont. Here are the words of Jonathan Edwards describing his future wife in a letter to a friend:

“There is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of that almighty Being, who made and rules the world, and there are certain seasons in which this great Being, in some way or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, and that she hardly cares for anything, except to meditate on him - that she expects after a while to be received up where he is, to be raised out of the world and caught up into heaven; being assured that he loves her too well to let her remain at a distance from him always.”

Sarah Pierpont became for Jonathan Edwards a model and inspiration of what a personal, intimate, and genuine relationship with God looked like. In his subsequent career as a pastor, Edwards would study religious conversion and expressions of faith with the zeal of a scientist, recording and publishing his observations, and refining his preaching over and over again to combine both a rational, logical argument with an emphasis on experiencing God profoundly. Edwards brought together the head and the heart in his sermons…and in 1734 a revival broke out in his congregation, which spread throughout New England. It was the first of its kind in the Americas.

Today, Edwards is mostly remembered for one Sermon, which most of us were forced to read in our High School American Literature class: It’s called “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and it is usually cited as an early example of “Hellfire and Brimstone” style preaching. It’s also not very representative of most of his sermons, which focused on the wonders of God’s creation, the promise of salvation, and the hope of heaven.

Jonathan Edwards was eventually joined by other talented preachers like George Whitefield, Gilbert Tennent, and John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement. Many of them traveled widely in the colonies, preaching to open-air crowds when they could no longer fit in the churches. All of them drew on the full range of human experience and emotion, and they emphasized the need for a personal, intimate relationship with God. They also taught that the evidence of a person’s genuine conversion was a transformed life—if all you did was get emotional at a revival service, you missed the point. It’s what happens when you go home to your family, or back to your workplace that counts—and not just for a day or two, but in the months and years to come.

Cumulatively, these revivals came to be known as the “Great Awakening” and they had the effect of dramatically increasing religious participation and piety across the board in early American churches. But they also had profound effects outside of the church—some of those most affected by the Great Awakening would go on to become key leaders in the Abolitionist movement to end slavery, and also the Women’s suffrage movement. They established educational institutions that are still around today, like Dartmouth, Rutgers, Brown, and Princeton. And because it encouraged individual rights and personal freedom, the Great Awakening has been cited by historians as a driving force leading up to the American Revolution.

Jonathan and Sarah Edwards had 11 children. Among their descendants are one United States Vice President, one controller of the United States Treasury, three state governors, 30 judges, three United States senators, three mayors, 65 college professors, 13 college presidents, 66 physicians, 100 overseas missionaries, and a multitude of pastors too numerous to count.