Annunciation Sunday, Year C | Luke 1:26-38
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
March 20, 2022
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
When you came in this morning, chances are you were wondering what happened to all the purple. We’re deep in the heart of Lent, and white doesn’t typically show up again until Easter morning. So what’s going on? Well, when I was planning out our services at the beginning of the Church Year, I noticed that this Thursday is the Feast of the Annunciation. Since most people aren’t able to attend a mid-week service, I thought it would be good to observe that festival of Gabriel’s announcement to Mary today. What I didn’t think about was all the work that would be involved. The liturgical color for this commemoration is white—hence the decor. Unfortunately, that color change meant the Altar Guild needed to—and still will—work extra hard to switch everything around. I both apologize and thank them and everyone else who spent time making the changes. I never intended to make your lives more difficult, and I’ll keep all the extra labor in mind for future planning!
The other thing I didn’t think about was how exactly the Annunciation would fit into our observation of Lent. This time of year typically see us travel with Jesus on his last trip to Jerusalem, so jumping back to this early in his story really disrupts our flow. I was feeling pretty stuck until I looked at a commentary that mentioned this is a feast of the Incarnation, the proclamation of Jesus coming to dwell and live both among us and as one of us.
If you’ve spent any time on religious news sites or message boards over the past few decades, you’ve probably seen a lot of wringing of hands about the death of the Church in America. Attendance is declining; smaller churches are closing; and there doesn’t appear to be any way to slow it down. While I can’t say I like all the results, I don’t think this “decline” is a bad thing.
The Church has been living under illusions of Christendom for a long time—since the 300’s, really. That’s when Constantine installed Christianity as the official religion throughout the Roman Empire, and Western culture has been seen as integrated with it ever since. Everything revolved around the Church, which was essentially the charitable arm of the State. From the early Medieval Era to the 1950’s, each Sunday saw the entire community attending local services. National holidays were scheduled around Church festivals. All of society was assumed to be “Christian,” whether its practices aligned with Jesus’ teachings or not.
But frankly, under Christendom the Church became arrogant—as the dominant cultural player, everyone was expected to go to church. But over the last century, things began to shift. Technical advancements allowed people to redefine their relationship with Biblical scripture. Influential segments of the Church in Europe either supported or were silent in the face of fascist causes. And scandals of abuse and pastoral hypocrisy were exacerbated by cover-ups, resulting in the Institutional Church losing more and more of its influence and credibility—and rightly so. With the Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s, Sunday attendance began to noticeably decline, and the Church turned to marketing practices to draw people back inside. This shift saw us become something new: the Attractional Church, where evangelism was mainly an attempt to modernize and become “seeker-sensitive.” Most of us thought using newer language, casual settings, and more contemporary music—none of which are bad things—would draw people back through the doors.
While updating our services, we also started major outreach attempts with Christians gathering in the community for special events in order to convert lots of people who could then be funneled back into local churches. We used targeted marketing to appeal to desirable demographics and invested in expensive programs that would maintain our numbers. It was a time of tremendous effort and sincerity, but it didn’t really work: some people trickled back in, far more continue to leave.
So what’s the problem? Why does the Church continue to “die”? Are we really on life support, or have we simply messed up our messaging? Are “competing” religions simply more attractive? Maybe people just hate and reject Jesus now? Has globalization changed the world so much that we simply don’t need a Savior, Comforter, or Friend?
Personally, I don’t think that’s what’s going on. While the efforts and expenditures of the Attractional Church were great on the surface, if you look at it closely, we’ve simply substituted the raw hubris of Christendom for a similar vice: selfishness. Deep down, it turns out our actions, changes, and attempts at “outreach” weren’t really focused on the “seeker” or person unfamiliar with the Church. Those methods received all the publicity and analysis, but each one was actually intended to bring “them” back, to tuck as many outsiders as we could manage safely into our fold as “one of us.” While clothed in the garb of extending the faith and providing eternal security, we’ve had enough time now to see that at its heart, it was simply an attempt to prop up a fading institution. More converts meant more money meant more security and longevity.
Today, we find ourselves in even more of a desert landscape. Christianity is one of many choices available to occupy people’s attention, and with the explosion of the self-help movement, many don’t necessarily look to formal religion for guidance at all. Add the rise of the service industry, and a big chunk of the population can’t physically make it to Sunday services in the first place. The weekend has blended into the work week, and holidays are just another time to head out and celebrate by spending money. All the competition for time and bandwidth really does make it look like the Church is dying, if not already dead. No wonder we lament the end of the world and our destiny to be consumed by the glories of the past.
But, as I said earlier, in my opinion, all this change is good. No authority, no power, no influence; humbled, outcast, and consigned to obscurity—our present situation in the West puts us more in tune with the Early Church—the Church prior to Christendom—than any other time in at least 1500 years.
Last Saturday, a small group from St. Andrew’s spent the day at a “Fresh Expressions” conference in El Paso. Fresh Expressions is a renewal movement within the Church of England that’s come to the United States to encourage us to become a new—yet ancient—form of community: the Incarnational Church. Instead of expecting people to simply come to us of their own accord like we did under Christendom, the Incarnational Church goes out into the world, like the Attractional Church began to do. But where the Attractional Church expected people to return to our buildings and model themselves on our culture, the Incarnational Church takes the Gospel with them wherever they are and infuses Christ into the midst of daily life. The Incarnational Church doesn’t just stay inside or meet at one place or time. It gathers in “third spaces,” those spots you go when you want to hang out somewhere other than home (the first space) or work (the second space). We aren’t planning to abandon our buildings or Sunday gatherings in the foreseeable future, but we’ve started to realize that those things alone aren’t really the Church.
The Church has gazed far too longingly and for far too long on empire, authority, modernization, and marketing. And after focusing on the faces of those gods for generations, we’ve forgotten they aren’t the One we ought to reflect. It’s time that we once again turn from our own images of power and once again follow Christ into the world—and not just to foreign countries but to our own neighborhood playgrounds and stores and restaurants and salons and houses.
So no, the “decline of the Church” isn’t the end of the world. And just like Gabriel, I’m here to announce that a new world is dawning, that Christ is coming—not simply coming again in some unknown future but coming still, as he has been through the centuries! He might be a little hard to recognize after all our time mistaking other gods for him. And just like 2,000 years ago, his continuing arrivals are unlikely to look like what we expect. The fact is, we’re probably going to need to go looking for him not just once but again and again—searching the parks and pubs and apartment complex community rooms—because the incarnate Jesus never sits still too long. He lives and moves and breathes, always a step ahead, constantly present yet hiding just out of sight. Our job is to follow, to uncover and celebrate the clues to his presence wherever they might be found. And as we go, walking from false yet fading security into holy mystery, maybe we’ll finally understand the biggest mystery of all: Christ has been standing beside us all along, waiting for us to join him in transforming what is into God’s Kingdom of what can be.