Give Me That Wal-Mart Religion

Jay Marshall, Dean
ESR Programmed Worship
Sept. 7, 2006

Micah 4:1-7

"Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near." Jesus' first sermon in Matthew is one of the shortest sermons I know of, especially with repentance as the main point. No snorting. No ranting. No monosyllabic words stretched into three, punctuated with a gasp for air at the end. It is an uncomplicated message calling for a seemingly simple response, though where I came from it was a much easier to agree to on Sunday than to live with on Monday through Friday, and especially on Saturday night.

"Trust in God. Trust also in me," Jesus said to his disciples while talking about the way one comes into relationship with the divine. It was an invitation to surrender, to focus, to follow.

Paul chimes in, as Paul is prone to do: "If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." (Romans 10:9) His doctrinal expansion in that sentence adds to the stakes a bit. But still, faith sounds so easy. It is about looking toward and trusting in a competent and powerful God.

Getting from point A to B sounds simple in its basic presentation. Until we begin to think. It starts as simply as wondering who Cain married, anyway? And what possible use would physical streets of gold have if heaven is a spiritual dimension? What does it mean if God rejects some while choosing others? The next thing we know, we're demythologizing the Gospels, reconstructing a feminine identity of the divine, and re-appropriating the text so that is meaningful in our context. What was presented as a simple decision of faith becomes a complex, entangled process in which we engage in mental and emotional combat with centuries of responses to the same set of information and questions. The dedicated among us usually manage to reconstruct ourselves to a functional level with a respectable spiritual capacity. That will include a redefined image of God and a rehabilitated understanding of the church.

Rufus Jones offers a nice Quakerish understanding of this (pardon the gender exclusive language, please): "The essence of the Gospel on the Divine side is this expression of forgiveness and love. The essence of the Gospel on the human side lies in the fact that it turns the face to God and sets free from sin. It makes the man a new man. It makes the slave to sin a free man. It makes the prodigal a son. It does nothing short of transforming a human soul by linking it to its Divine source, and by waking in it the joy and love which belong to life with God. Salvation, according to this thought, is essentially a transformation. It is much more than an escape. It is a present consciousness of Divine possession, and the enjoyment of freedom and sonship. Those who are saved with this kind of salvation know it." (Practical Christianity, p. 117)

At the end of the proverbial rainbow of faith stands the kingdom of heaven. Jesus named it as a motivation for repentance. It was backdrop to the conversation in John about trusting Jesus just as one trusts God. The race Paul ran focused upon it. Of the various ways that "pot of gold" is described in Scripture, I'm most attracted to the vision in Micah 4. Nations stream to a common point to worship God. Peace and security permeate the environment. It is a model of the transformation that is repeatedly called for in biblical texts. It is precisely here that I think the 21^st century church, and by implication, seminaries, have our work cut out for us.

Though the church has been working for the kingdom of God for a couple of millennia now, in many ways, the world remains a mess. Transformation beyond a personal or small group level is difficult to discover. Our pluralistic surroundings and our post-modern arrogance leave us fairly content with the mess—so long as the countertop is clean or at least acceptable, it doesn't much matter how the cabinets are stocked.

While the church hasn't succeeded very well in affecting transformation that knits together individuals into community, community transformation has occurred outside the church. I see it powerfully when I look at the First Church of Wal-Mart. Oddly enough, Wal-Mart has become a point of numerous, and usually humorous, religious experiences for me. I had a messianic moment there last spring. I was scouring their vegetable plant inventory when a grandmotherly figure beside me yelled "Savior!" Across the room a young boy yelled back, "I coming!" I thought, boy if I had a dollar for every time I've head that. Wal-Mart has even been the location for reflections on the death and eternity. A friend was shopping at a Wal-Mart in Muncie one day when the tornado sirens sounded. It was close, and everyone was advised to get on the floor. She recounted to me later that the first thought to flash through her mind was "O God, please don't let me die at Wal-Mart!"

I don't like what Wal-Mart does to small local businesses, or how they've driven suppliers out of business, or what I hear about wages and benefits, or the accusations made in the discrimination class action suits. But like it or not, Wal-Mart has become a mainstay in our society. More than just a mainstay, it has transformed the loyalties and expectations of multitudes. This is a turning of the face as sincere as any repentance I have ever known or seen.

Wal-Mart has become a gathering place, of sorts. Many people go there regularly and hang out, clogging the aisles with their overstuffed carts while they visit the person who lives across the street from them that they never see except at Wal-Mart. When I was pastor at New Castle, I joked one day that Wal-Mart was changing my visitation patterns. Every trip to Wal-Mart, I'd see 12-15 people from the meeting. Instead of trying to catch a busy population at home where I intruded on their few moments of solitude, I was going to just hang out in the Wal-Mart snack bar. Maybe buy them a coke, or chat with them as they made their way through the house ware section. I thought I might have to retract that statement when I learned they some felt they needed to dress better when they went to Wal-Mart in case they received a visit from their pastor!

Wal-Mart is an example of a vision that affected group transformation on a grand scale. For the time-conscious, they made it possible to find almost anything we need under one roof—you may have to scour the entire 20 acre plot to find it, but chances are, it is there. For the cost conscious, they convinced us they could provide acceptable quality at the lowest price. How persuasive are they? They convince middle-aged women, who thanks to culture and stereotypes, fret about waning physical beauty and sexuality, to proudly wear brand names like Sag Harbor and Faded Glory because the price is right. To an obese male population that has its own stereotypes with which to contend, they provide a clothing brand called "Big Dog" and decorate it with defiant slogans like, "If you can't run with the Big Dogs, stay on the porch."

It is not exactly the same as Micah's vision. "In the last days, the temple will be perched upon Walton's mountain. It will be raised above the competition . . ."—but you have to admit, people do stream to it. "Many people will say, 'I rejoiced with those who said, Come, let us go to Wal-Mart and see what is on sale."

Ironically, the movement has come full circle—I know of at least one former Wal-Mart that is now a Baptist Church. I was hoping they'd be good stewards and just tweak the tagline on the front of the building so that it read "Jesus for Less" but they didn't go that route. I've not been in the building but can't help but wonder if you can still get your vision checked and your tires rotated during Sunday School.

Wal-Mart has transformed attitudes of the masses about shopping. It has reshaped the business landscape in our neighborhoods. It has even influenced how some imagine the church. I am not—let me repeat, I am not—suggesting that Wal-Mart is a model or a vision for the 21^st century church. But for me, the larger vision that involves a unifying transformation of society is a key component of the Gospel and it is missing from the 21^st century church as manifested in its more moderate and liberal settings.

In making that statement, I'm confessing that I want a goal to accompany the process and am convinced I have a heritage on which to stand with that. I don't care for the narrow, exclusive versions that litter the historic trail where the faithful have trodden. But even after my many years of journey, study and process, allowing for historical, context and personal bias, I claim a faith core that God calls me to a) personal transformation as a result of encountering the Living Christ and b) to be part of a community. At our best, we find ways to create local communities, which is no small achievement. But ours is a global, cosmic deity—and that is the breadth of the community to which we are called. Micah's vision, while still elevating Yahweh over all others, imagines all nations coming to a common point for common teaching.

It is exactly at that point of common teaching, or commonality beyond the least common denominator, that our ilk of Christian struggles, primarily because we are so saturated with post-modern realities. Being affected by our context, post-modern Christianity encourages experience over reason, subjectivity over objectivity, spirituality over religion, images over words. At some point, we will look back and critique this era as though it promoted disco, bell-bottoms and platform shoes. For now, we wear the latest fashions, trying not to lose our whole identity in it as we seek to become ministers of the gospel even as we heal from our own wounds and grow in awareness of our own prejudices.

How does it affect us? In Bowling Alone Robert Putnam's statistics imply that even as our generation becomes more tolerant, we are also becoming more disengaged from one another—which really makes it difficult to have a unifying vision! Friends model that all too well when we begin describing our faith by naming who we are not.

The late Charles Winquist strikes a chord with me when he says theology is now more "interruptive and critical rather than systematizing and stabilizing . . .; it is no longer 'queen of the sciences' or even a confession of faith but, rather, . . . an intervention that resists the totalizing and repressive tendencies of dominant discourses . . . . Theology may be an experiment with truth, but it is more importantly an experiment of desire."

I think at some point we must learn that our individual desire, though important, is not enough. So long as it is our central focus, we will remain fragmented—fragmented within ourselves, because we have conflicting desires; fragmented from one another because we desire different things. Fragmented from God, unless our desire is for God alone, or God turns out to be our own creation.

Fragmentation is probably not a negative thing in a post-modern context. It is merely a more rough and jagged synonym for diversity. Diverse or not, I believe we need a vision of what God's community would look like—and not a tiny, alternative niche community—we need a vision appropriate to a universal, cosmic deity. I'd prefer one that issues the invitation to repent in the sense of turning to and committing to God, and somehow implants a few, binding common ideals. I'd like one that is inclusive but also has form and substance.

I don't have an easy solution to this dilemma. In fact, I don't have any solution to it. I merely have a burden—and also hope and conviction—conviction that grows from being captivated by my reading of the biblical story and hope that our seminaries of the 21^st century will, in fact, rise to the challenge of leading the church rather than castigating it. If all else fails, I shall just wait patiently, trusting that one day soon the kingdom of God will be on sale at Wal-Mart for $1.99.