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.