In the process of writing this sermon, I realized that my recent graduation marks the tenth year I have spent in formal theological education: four years as an undergraduate Religion and Philosophy double major, three years as a Masters of Divinity student, and three years to date as a low-residency student at San Francisco Theological Seminary.
Looking backward on ten years in theological classrooms, three themes emerge that I would like to share with you this morning: pluralism, progressivism, and pragmatism. I hope these themes will provide some guidance about what it means to follow the way of Jesus as a Western Christian in the 21st century.
Pluralism
The first of the three themes is pluralism. One of my favorite college professors, The Rev. Dr. Jeffrey Rogers, once predicted that in the 21st century Christianity would be shaped most decisively by how it addressed two areas: sexuality and pluralism. First, by sexuality, he did not just mean homosexuality. Although he certainly knew that same-sex relationships would be an influential factor, he also meant, among other related issues, that as people increasingly delayed marriage and as humans increasingly live longer that the issues of sexuality and singleness as well as sexuality after divorce or after a partner dies -- would become more and more frequent realities that Christians would be forced to address. More importantly for this morning, by pluralism, he meant that Christians would increasingly have to face the existence of other religious traditions that are as healthy and venerable as Christianity itself.
As many of you know, I was raised as an active participant in a big-steeple Southern Baptist Church in South Carolina. I had many non-Southern Baptist friends, but it would have been fine with me if all 6 billion people on Earth were Southern Baptists. And, of course, some Southern Baptists are still hell-bent on trying to make that the case.
As I grew older I began to meet more and more non-Southern Baptists, whom I respected - who were kind, well-adjusted, smart, funny, competent human beings. Some of them were not even Christian (gasp!). My Southern Baptist church was the center of my world, but I wasn't sure how to reconcile the claim that the most important decision anyone can make is whether or not to accept Jesus as Lord with the undeniable existence of so many incredible people, who either didn't understand Jesus the same way I did or didn't particularly care about Jesus one way or the other.
Using terminology from the late philosopher Richard Rorty that I have today, but did not have then, I was experiencing a de-centering. My Southern Baptist church was the center of my world, and my church taught me that Jesus -- as understood by the Southern Baptist Convention -- was the one, true, right center of life, the universe, and everything. But as I grew older I increasingly met people whose world centered on the Methodist church or the Catholic church as well as others whose world didn't center around any religion; instead, their lives centered on their business, teaching, art, family, hobby, or favorite sports team. In the face of so different centers of belief, I was increasingly unable to maintain with integrity the position that my Southern Baptist faith was the one, true center. I eventually came to see that my personal experience parallels the de-centerings experienced by Christians in the past.
One of the first major de-centerings for Christians was the publication of astronomer Nicolai Copernicus' 1543 book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, which argued-- based on observable, verifiable evidence -- that we live in a heliocentric, not geocentric, universe. In other words, the Earth was de-centered from the incorrect assumption that our planet is the center of the universe. We know today that there are over 100 billion galaxies in the universe, and each of those 100 billion galaxies is comprised of billions of stars. Earth is only a small planet, orbiting one medium-sized star toward the edge of one spiral galaxy that, again, is only one among over 100 billion other galaxies in the universe.
As if Copernicus' discovery were not enough, a second major de-centering was the publication of English naturalist Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, which de-centered the human species. Then, less than fifty years later, at the turn of the 20th century, Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud de-centered the conscious mind by demonstrating the influence of the unconscious. This revelation was followed a few years later by German-born theoretical physicist Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, which de-centered our understandings of time and space.
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