That's Entertainment?

 

“And now Ladies and Gentlemen, for your entertainment

on our stage tonight, we have a really, really big show.”

                                                                                    Ed Sullivan, 1963

            We have a serious problem in American society, one that has been growing for a long time. Today, it has reached epidemic proportions. It is the insatiable public hunger for entertainment. This “hunger” – at bottom a need for distraction – has invaded nearly all areas of our lives. We now live in a society of constant noise: television, radio, cell phones, and recorded music. We sit at stop lights and often the music from other cars is so loud that it makes our cars vibrate. This apparently is a new inalienable right, the right to make your own noise no matter how intrusive and annoying it is to others.

            This entertainment hunger is addictive! Television is the primary culprit. It is the 20^th century medium, which - from an innocent beginning - has now become a monster. It feeds the entertainment disease and it is with us every hour of every day. It is almost impossible to escape it. Everywhere one goes, televisions are blaring whether people are watching them or not. When I was rector of a parish and doing a lot of home visitation, often I would have to ask people to turn off their TV’s so I could talk with them. Remember when we were content with just one television set in the home? Now everyone in a household has to have their own. Some people have to sleep with them turned on. Apparently many people are uncomfortable with silence. No wonder! They experience so little of it.

            Here is a story about the pervasiveness of television programs and how our brains absorb and retain what we hear. In 1989, just before I came to St. Louis, I went to Honduras with the North Dakota National Guard. I was the chaplain with the 164^th Combat Engineer Group. Our people were building a farm-to-market road and our rotation in country lasted three weeks. On the night before we were to fly back to the States, we were taken to a bivouac near the airport, fed, and given army cots. There was literally nothing to do and so about three hundred soldiers were just lying on their cots early in the evening wide awake waiting for darkness. Suddenly I heard someone start singing, “Flintstones, meet the Flintstones, they’re the modern stone age family, from the town of Bedrock, they’re a page right out of history . . .” Most of the soldiers joined in and sang through the whole lyric of the Flintstones theme song. When they finished, the leader sang, “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip, that started from this tropic port, about this tiny ship. . .” Again a large number of the soldiers joined him in singing the Gilligan’s Island theme. This went on for a long time through many, many television program theme songs. I just laid back on my cot and laughed! I was amazed that all these guys retained an almost perfect memory of all those songs. Thinking about it later, I was not so amazed. They had all been raised on this stuff and had heard it countless times. They had all been away from television for three weeks and most of them were a bit homesick. Singing those TV theme songs was very expressive of a need!

            The amusing thing about television today is that, even with the multiplicity of channels available, there is very little that people want to watch. Years ago, we would have thought that having 150 program choices would be entertainment heaven. Sadly, the human hunger for entertainment has become so jaded that most of what is on is no longer satisfying. Enter the bizarre in the form of reality TV. Someone please explain to me the popularity of this phenomenon. Don’t people know that it’s all carefully staged? If this stuff has anything to do with reality, God help us.

            This introduces an attendant issue in the entertainment discussion, i.e. the reality programming called television news. The onslaught on our minds & emotions by television news reporting and commentary 24/7 has changed the world and not for the better. I have to observe that the steady barrage of political opinion from the left on CNN and the right on Fox has contributed greatly to the cynicism and division in our country. I say, “Enough already!” This steady barrage of (bad) news is depressing. People are sick and tired of it!

            It is amusing to me what all this communication capability has done to people. They are isolated & insulated in their own little worlds of social media, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, texting, etc. The other day I was in a coffee shop in Bismarck, North Dakota with my brother and a friend of mine. We were doing some reminiscing and we happened to notice three young people sitting at a nearby table. Well, they were sitting together but that is about as far as it went!  We watched them for a while and not one of them ever spoke to the other two. They were totally absorbed in their lap tops, IPads and cell phones. So much for face to face conversation! People would rather play with their electronic toys than talk to each other.

            Speaking of electronics, I have a theory about the poor level of achievement in public schools. One of the reasons is the great difficulty which education has with the issue of homework. Today’s children have been brought up on a steady diet of television, music, cell phones, and video games which they can enjoy literally all the time. Entertainment! This “training” makes it nearly impossible for a child to sit down in front of a text book and do math problems. That is definitely not entertainment! It’s work! Which is a child going to choose, entertainment or work? You’ve got to be kidding!  The whole system breaks down at the point when the student has to sit down and do the work. Boring! How often have you heard that? The entertainment culture has bred a deep need for instant gratification.

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            My real problem with all of this has to do with the fact that many people think that everything should become part of the entertainment culture, even the church. What kind of churches have popped up everywhere and have enjoyed a rapid rate of growth? You guessed it! It is churches which entertain people with performances of popular music. It’s called entertainment evangelism. The people sit in comfortable theatre seats and enjoy musical and other presentations which require no input or participation on their part. They have seemingly done away with a formal liturgy and the sacraments. Is this really the church? I wonder!

            Worshipping is not about entertainment! It is about transcendence and a sometimes agonizing assessment of our personal lives. It is about the element of personal sacrifice modeled for us by Jesus. It’s about personal transformation, a painful process at best. It is about a call to die to self and a summons to rise to new life in the community of the faithful. It’s about a call to reconciliation and mission and personal witness! I have rarely found the church to be entertaining. I have found it to be deeply challenging and fulfilling! The church quite frankly is serious business and it ought to be so. What we desperately need in our society is less entertainment and a more serious focus on the many perplexing questions about life which confront us daily. Our souls are dying in this glut of entertainment.

 

                                                                        The Rev. Dr. Richard B. Tudor

It's Rally Day!

          Sound the Trumpets! Beat the drums! All across the church today, congregations are gathering to celebrate “Rally Day.” That at least is how the Lutherans designate the day. Episcopal churches don’t use that name but they attempt to do the same thing. On the Sunday after Labor Day, churches “rally” their membership after the parish church has been in hibernation all summer. What they are doing is “gearing up” for the program year, i.e. choir practices, children’s Sunday School, ECW meetings, adult education, etc. More activity! On Rally Day, parish clergy will be carefully counting the house. It is a good indicator of who are the faithful. There is nothing more encouraging than a strong beginning! There will be disappointment if the attendance is lower than expected.

The Great Awakenings

            To put the day in perspective, I would like to talk about two religious movements called the First & Second Great Awakenings. They occurred in Protestant churches in New England and took place in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. I see an analogy between what took place in the Great Awakenings and what we today attempt to do on the Sunday after Labor Day. Certainly it is no stretch to say that the parish church attempts to “awaken” after three months of relative inactivity.

            However, we need to be clear that the two great awakenings were much more than just an attempt to shake congregations out of a summer of lethargy. They were intense efforts by deeply serious parish pastors to rekindle deeper faith & commitment in their people. They were attempts to renew belief in people who were guilty of backsliding & complacency (secular drift). In the minds of the clergy the “awakening” was a matter of life and death! St. Paul spoke to this issue. Read Romans 13, verses eleven and twelve:

. . . you know what hour it is, how it is full tine now for you to wake

      from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we believed;

                the night is far gone, the day is at hand.

            Paul strikes a note of urgency; his message is that people need to wake up to an awareness of the need to look to their salvation. Now is the time! Awaken!

            To understand the effort put into the great awakenings, we need to be aware that Church people founded this country and they were deadly serious about establishing a Christian society, at least initially. The American society of the 17^th century changed in the 18^th & 19^th centuries. The clergy were distressed about the direction it was taking and they attempted to call it back to an earlier standard of faith and devotion. They did the “calling back” by preaching powerful sermons. Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield were two of the greatest preachers in the 18^th century. Hearing Whitefield preach was apparently a life changing experience. He held crowds as large as 5,000 or 10,000 people spellbound. Why was he able to do this?

The Word

            Whitefield had the conviction of the Word of God in his heart! He was able to effectively & emotionally transfer that feeling to others. His faith was contagious! He took seriously the imperative to preach the gospel. Whitefield and Edwards were driven to teach what were called the three tenets of the gospel: 1) The Sovereignty of the Creator God; 2) The Fallenness (depravity) of man; and 3) The Redemption of humanity by God’s Son Jesus. These preachers taught the core statement which energized the Protestant Reformation in the 16^th century, i.e. “The righteous shall live by faith.”  (Romans 1:17) Whitefield preached the Grace of God and he preached it so effectively that it literally lifted people from their seats.

            Of course what was really happening in the 18^th and 19^th centuries was the fact that the modern world was taking shape. Enlightenment thought was influencing the development of all institutions in society. Science and technology were on the march, pushing the church and its dependence on the revelation of God out to the boundaries of life.

            We - living at the beginning of the 21^st century - understand this process very well. We see the end product, a well developed, aggressive secularity. What do these words secular and secularity mean? In some sense they mean that what you see is what you get. No supernatural explanations! Secularity is defined by what it denies. There will be no religious explanations of reality. This is what the church leadership in the 18^th & 19^th centuries were reacting to and this is what the Church is facing today.

            What is the Church to do? Are the only options to fight them or join them? There is only one option. The Church must do what the leadership did in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, turn to the Word of God. What else have we? The Church is different from every other institution in society in that it has been entrusted with the responsibility of carrying a message (the free gift of the grace of God) which it has received out into the world. The Church has heard the Word of God in the person of Jesus and it must preach that Word! That responsibility is its life. It is what drives and energizes the Church. Put another way: the Church has something to say and it must say it powerfully and with effect. This “responsibility” is what was at the center of the fervor driving the great awakening and it is what should inspire us today. We are not going to attract people to committed membership in the church with gimmicks and clever marketing strategies. The Word must be preached unequivocally! It must touch the hearts of the people who hear it!

The Road to Emmaus

            In the 24^th chapter of Luke’s Gospel we find a story which speaks directly to the issue. It takes place on the afternoon and early evening of the first Easter. Two followers of Jesus are walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus, a journey of about seven miles. While they are walking, a stranger joins them. They talk with him about all that has happened that day. The stranger listens to all that they have to say about Jesus and the dramatic events permeating his life and death and he then interprets them using the scriptures. The three travelers reach Emmaus at the end of the day and the two disciples ask the stranger to “stay with them.” When the stranger takes bread, blesses it, and breaks it, Luke tells us that the eyes of the two disciples were opened and they recognize the stranger as Jesus. He immediately vanishes! Then they say to each other (and this is the punch line), “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?”

            Here is the key to what should happen to us when we attend worship. Do our hearts burn within us when we hear the scriptures, the Word of God opened to us. When and if that ever happened, that will be the moment when our own personal “Great Awakening” will occur.

            There is a hymn in the Episcopal Hymnal 1980 which directly speaks to the subject. It is # 546. The music was composed by Handel. Here is the first verse:

Awake my soul, stretch every nerve and press with vigor on:

                        A heavenly race demands thy zeal and an immortal crown,

                          And an immortal crown.

Postscript 

            I think that it would be a good idea to make the first Sunday after Labor Day an official liturgical observance.  Call it “Great Awakening Sunday.” The focus could be to instill an enthusiasm for evangelism in the local congregation. God knows that the Episcopal Church could use that important emphasis.