What is essential for civilization, and in particular for democracy, is not just slipping away. It is imploding. The plutocratic autocracy has arrived in the form of billionaires who eliminate programs that feed poor children while stuffing their pockets with billions in government subsidies.
When pastors retire after a lifetime of service to the church, they often preach a last sermon unfettered by concerns for continued employment. It is the sermon “they always wanted to preach” but were afraid to, lest some big contributor take her money and leave the building. Clergy are, by and large, not a particularly courageous lot.
Strangely, this critique of the death of church as spawned by progressives is really another way of saying that we failed to remain intellectually dishonest about how we got the Bible, what it means to call it our flawed but irreplaceable Story of Origin, and what scholars have now shown us about the enormous gap between faith as developed doctrine and faith as discipleship–a commitment to being followers of Jesus, not worshippers of Christ. We may be a lot smaller, but like leaven in the loaf, we may also be more subversive.
Last year, at the height of the pandemic (or is this the height of the pandemic?), a clergy colleague asked me to write a new version of the birth of Jesus that might preserve the radical message of Luke but translate it into more contemporary metaphors.