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I'm terribly grateful to be here with you today. Grateful to have received the invitation from my friend Ted Wardlaw, who I met 12 years ago before. He had accepted this particular, odd and wondrous calling

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. I loved all the signs around this seminary relevant winsome. I said, gosh, he's put up signs about himself everywhere. Okay. Just left off handsome. Um, I'm going to be switching the

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order of my two lectures uh, today, so I'm going to give the second one, first stop apologizing for a church. You are not a member of? Why am I switching the order? Because

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I'm not presbyterian and I can uh mhm. I want to make a point of saying hello to the people in the overflow area. I was kind of freaked out by that idea that there are these people

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out there who I couldn't see who were watching me . So I spent some time with them during Craig's lecture to see what they were doing, if they were goofing around or paying attention or drinking beer or

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whatever and they were very attentive. But I was just sort of convinced it was a bad idea to put a bunch of clergy together in a room, listening to another clergy on a screen where nobody could

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keep track of what they were doing, sort of like when you put all the con for man's in the back row of the church and you're up there seeing them goof around, But a word of scripture

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from market when they arrived, the Pharisees came out and started in on him, badgering him to prove himself, pushing him up against the wall, provoked , jesus said, why does this generation clammer for

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miraculous guarantees? If I have anything to say about it, you'll not get so much as a hint of a guarantee. Why does this generation clammer from miraculous guarantees. Back in december, we all saw

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it in the news. A man alleged to be tim Tebow is Pastor Said that he knew why the Denver Broncos were 71 since installing Tebow is quarterback. It's not luck. He said luck isn't winning six

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games in a row. It's favor. It's God's favor. Sorry that pastor seemed to have skipped a few theology classes saying that all those touchdowns were a sign of God's favor is what I've come to call

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touchdown theology. And in my book it gets a grade of F because the logic of it breaks down so easily for people with any bit of intelligence. Surely there are other christians praying just as hard on

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other football teams. And what about all those players of other religions? Does that pastor honestly think that God is sitting up in heaven on a barca lounger with a beer, a bratwurst in a broncos jersey

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handing out touchdowns in that case to God and jesus support the same team and if not then what team does the holy spirit work through? And during commercial breaks, does Jacob wrestled the angel for the remote

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? Does mary the devoted sports fan sit glued to the heavenly large screen tv while her resentful sister Martha is in the kitchen making chicken wings in guacamole for the disciples. Enough already, this is the silliness

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that touchdown theology leads to a rabbit warren of ridiculous scenarios that ultimately make no sense but people fall for it, even ministers, they look for the simplistic answer, the miraculous guarantee. I can just see

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jesus rolling his eyes in heaven, asking once again why does this generation clammer for miraculous guarantees to be fair. The player himself has made no such outrageous claims. Tebow has never claimed any sort of miraculous

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guarantee for himself. He makes it clear that he thinks God could care less about who wins football games . And in an interesting twist, the pastor claimed later to have been misquoted and also said that he

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had never claimed to be to BO's pastor at all . But the story drew national attention because whether the pastor said it or not, other people were saying stuff just like it, clergy included. And it

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was embarrassing to me as a person of faith, as a member of that same christian family. But I also couldn't help but notice the obvious glee with which the media glommed onto touchdown theology as something to

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mock not from within the christian family, but from outside it. Touchdown theology became yet another reason to see christians as stupid. It was another arrow in the quiver of the spiritual but not religious and we

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christians had given it to them. I was mad at the other members of my christian family and I was mad at the critics from outside the family for their slick and quick answers. But I was also

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during that time, profoundly grateful for my own community of faith. First congregational church in glen Ellyn Illinois in the suburbs of Chicago, my local church, which felt like an oasis of faith and intellect in

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a sea of megachurch wannabes, I was grateful for the people in the pews and the fact that we could go beneath the surface and we could ask complex theological questions about what was going on. I was

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also grateful for reformed theological tradition that has been offering much more than touchdown theology for hundreds and hundreds of years. I was grateful to have a church to sit in and wrestle with texts where jesus must have

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been confronting some equally stupid version of touchdown theology in first century style. When he got so exasperated that he said, why does this generation clammer for miraculous guarantees? If I have anything to say about it

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, you'll get not so much as a hint. Apparently all of this is hardly a new problem. When I was a kid, my mother planned an enormous garden party and at the heart of her vision

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was that our backyard would be filled with these blooming daffodils that she had planted in anticipation of the party seasons before. But as the garden party date approached , the weather stayed very cold and no daffodils were

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even close to blooming. Yet on the day of the party, our lawn was filled with daffodils just as she had dreamed. The guests marveled at the springtime beauty of our yard, especially since no other

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garden in the neighborhood had any springtime action like that . But then after the guests went home, the daffodils drooped to my mother, crawled around the yard carefully removing all the cut daffodils that she had bought

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at the florist and painstakingly attached to chopsticks with wire twist ties that she had then carefully stuck in the ground. Now those daffodils were not fake, but they were short lived and flimsy, with no bulb

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under the earth to allow them to survive the rough weather on the surface. And for a short while they looked like real daffodils, but they did not have enough going on underneath to last. Sometimes.

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I think that's how the life of faith works. You can go to the religious flower shop and you can pick up a little bit of this, a little bit of that and you can decorate your life

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with it. You can visit this religious community with its beautiful art and you can watch a documentary about this other one. You can read this deep thinker and then the next you can say that you believe

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in 1000 wise sayings and make yourself this pretty bouquet of blossoms already for a picnic on a sunny day . But life is not a picnic. And the people who finally dig in and put down roots in

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one tradition bigger than themselves, have figured this out , tired of decorating their life with bouquets of their own choosing. They are ready to go deeper and even ready to put in the work that it requires

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because being a part of a religious tradition takes work and part of the nature of religion is that it delivers a message that rubs like sandpaper against our culture of narcissism. It is not all about you and

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no, you cannot make this stuff. Well, some would argue, yes, I can make this stuff up. In fact, atheists would say that all of us religious folk as well as the do

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it yourself made philosophy, spirituality, folk, that we're all making it up. But I would argue that when we really do invent our own spirituality with a flower from here and another from there, it's

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a bouquet that does not live long religious traditions created over time and heaven forbid by people who are not me, those have a longer shelf life. You can't make this up by yourself because the beauty of

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a long tradition is that it is bigger than anything you could do by yourself. But it's easy to play by the rules of religion, in which you write your own script, much harder to find meaning

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in the words of a book that we did not get to write for ourselves from an entirely different time . It is easy to create God in your own image and then follow her harder to work with the

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God who created you. And for some reason did not ask for your instructions. Anybody can find God on a picturesque mountain top. The miracle is that we can find God in the company of other people

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as annoying as we are. So why bother? In my own case, I know why I bother . I have a strong suspicion that any religion entirely of my own making would not be much worth following

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. It would be fun for a while. I could replace communion with pasta and a glass of wine in front of the tv. During lent, I could preach at length to myself about how wrong everybody

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else's and tell them what to give up. I could make my weekly offering in the shoe department at Nordstrom's because where your heart is, there shall your treasure be also. But the Church calls me out

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of idolatry as fun as it might be. It calls me out of worshipping my every opinion in my every thought. And it calls me most importantly, into the company of others. Left to my own

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devices, I would be left to all my own vices. But these days it is quite countercultural. Even consider judgmental is to suggest that somebody might benefit from the company of others in faith, particularly heaven

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forbid those who have gone before us in ancient traditions so much easier to point out the blind spots of our ancestors in the faith. There are missteps around women, sexuality, all kinds of things. But

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thinking people of faith know that we can still learn from the mighty cloud of witnesses who went before us . And even as we might think they are wrong about one thing, we can still lean into where

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they are right about the God thing, but that's hard work in some ways. It would just be so much easier and less messy to skip it and make up our own bouquet of what works for us

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these days. As several of our speakers have pointed out, the culture is full of people who call themselves spiritual but not religious. They're a diverse group of course, like any other. But for the

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purposes of this argument, let's define them as those people who do not worship with a particular religious community and do not identify with a particular tradition. Some may be religious sampling deep thought collecting, even church

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shopping, but the common denominator is a resistance to joining anyone community of faith of aligning with it. Sometimes these folks have been seriously injured or hurt by a religious community in their past and there's still in

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so much pain that they don't want to darken the door of a church. Others are turned off by a particular kind of church, one characterized by judgmental and literal thinking by that touchdown theology. And so

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they paint all churches and even all religions with the same broad brush, unaware that churches are as much of a mixed bag as the spiritual but not religious are. Some of them have concocted a religion and

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God of their own making. You must know these people, you must have friends like this. Some religious combination of exercise and caffeine coffee shops as spiritual community hikes is pilgrimage. The new york times,

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a sacred text and sunsets. We can't ever forget those sunsets. They're always finding God in the sunsets as if I and all other churchgoers cannot find God and the sunset like were these sad, rigid little

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gnomes with blinkers on taking orders from some evil, sexist, homophobic controller of our christian cult, just waiting to get the spiritual but not religious newsflash, that we don't have to sit in the pews,

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We don't have to read the bible, We don't have to judge other people. We could all be free to, which I want to respond. What church community are you describing? Because it certainly is

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not mine. And how dare you presumed to paint me with a broad brush? So here's my question for main line folks, where we have elevated niceness into our own religion? Why is it that when

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the spiritual but not religious complaint about Christianity? Why when they painted with a broad and bigoted brush, don't we object as well? Why don't we tell them a different story of churches where your questions are

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welcomed, but where we do learn from a tradition larger than we are, where we worship a God who invented us and not the other way around. If someone were to say to you, I am

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never going to visit any country in the continent of X. Y. Z. Because I object to the behavior of one of its leaders. And quite frankly, I can't believe a thoughtful person like you

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wouldn't object as well. What if someone said that to you about a continent in the world? You would call them on their bigotry. You would explain that the continent is people are diverse and complex.

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And if you lived in one of those countries, you might encourage them to give it a try. Generally these folks are working off an old definition of a narrow sliver of Christianity and they expect me to

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apologize for it, sorry. But I am tired of apologizing for a church that I'm not a member of now. Let me make one key distinction here and it's an important one. I'm not saying that

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the church should never apologize in my own denomination. We've had moments in our history where we've had to apologize, for example, for for wrongs done in the name of evangelism to the people of Hawaii and

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the congregational church. I'm not saying we shouldn't apologize and repent for the things that we have done wrong as the church, but what I'm saying is I am tired of personally apologizing for a church that I'm

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not a member of these descriptions of church now backwards . We christians are has worn thin for me and these days I take these people on this past fall , I drew some small amount of flak for a

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piece I wrote entitled spiritual but not religious. Please stop boring me as the angry emails poured in and I express shock to my husband. He said, what part of you thinks you can write an article

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entitled spiritual but not religious. Please stop boring me and not make people angry at you. So why wasn't personal? I explained in that short piece that I was tired of spiritual but not religious. People

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who think that they are unique, interesting and daring because they find God in the Sunset. Thank you for sharing spiritual but not religious. Sunset person I wrote, you are now comfortably in the norm for

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self centered american culture, right smack in the bland majority of people who find ancient religions dull but find themselves uniquely fascinating. Yeah, my take is that any idiot can find God in the Sunset. What

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is remarkable is finding God in the context of a flawed human community and a tradition bigger than you are with people who may not reflect God back to you in your own image. I followed that with a

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much longer piece in the christian century that argued the point more thoroughly, it was called you can't make this stuff up the limits of self made religion and in that I suggested that at some point, if

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you think about it, that person with the self made religion will use God given brain and the wisdom of hard experiences to start asking the angry and provocative questions of this spirituality, of the status quo.

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Who are you God of sunsets and rainbows and bunnies and chain emails about the value of good friends who are you cheap God of self satisfaction and isolation. Who are you God of the beautiful and the physically

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fit. Who are you God of the spiritual and not religious? Who are you? God of the lucky chief priest of the religion of gratitude? Who are you? And are you even worth knowing?

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Who are you? God? Who I invent? Is there could there be a more interesting God who invented me that short piece and the longer article both went viral. It first sent out by folks who

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appreciated the pieces and then reacted to by people who did not. I got more hate mail over those pieces than anything I've ever written. Who knew so many Atheists read religion blog posts? Yeah. Mhm

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. And at the risk of ticking them off all over again. What's that about? At any rate , I received countless outraged emails from people who thought that I was a judgmental christian, this was their

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logic, christians who are all judgmental, deluded hypocrites and who are responsible for most of the conflict in the world are supposed to be nonjudgmental. You were judgmental in your writing, which was caused by your

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being a christian, which is why we hate christians . Are you following the logic of this? Me neither. Let's just sum it up that when I questioned their terminal uniqueness and pointed out that they were

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now in the majority, I got a howl of complaint from the under cherished masses to which my private response was, Dear God, if I am this judgmental as a follower of jesus, just imagine how

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out of control I would be without him. Mm The other set of complaints came from some of my own people. What I would describe as my own people in the sort of liberal mainline christians who were

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furious with me for an entirely different reason. They believe that if we would just listen compassionately to all these people completely nonjudgmental, that somehow they would make their way into our churches. But apparently I had

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blown the chances of this ever happening by writing to an audience outside the confines of the church and telling what many of us feel to a group that wasn't supposed to know, that those people drive us all

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crazy these clergy said, but you can't tell them that by writing an article saying that christian community actually matters and might be better for us than a cup of coffee. I had played into the unchurched assumptions

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that we were, and again, here's that word judgmental for this particular group of clergy. Their liberal mainline logic was if you don't ever say anything critical of anyone, they will want to join you.

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And it's probably better not to say anything positive about your own project of christian community, because that would imply that it's better. Instead, you should just keep exuding niceness to people who criticize Christianity with their

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ignorant blanket statements. And furthermore, if you just apologize over and over again for a church you are not a member of, they will finally realize that you are different and they will come, That has

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been the main line project for the last 30 years or so. How's it working for you? Obviously , my congregation is probably like many of yours, it's full of the spiritual, but not religious.

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I mean, not only is America full of the spiritual, not religious, many of our pews are full of the spiritual but not religious. My church is like so many populated by folks who may well

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be recovering from one form of Christianity or another and they are glad to have found us. And we also have your unchurched people who actually have not been injured by any church and they are the weirdest group

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because they're like actually excited to be a part of a church now and are sort of baffled by all the apologizing that the church does for injuries that they have not yet experienced in our hands. And of

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course, believe it or not, contrary to the oft told story of mainline decline, I suspect we like, you have many mainline people raised in a tradition that they basically appreciated and have decided to stick

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with. And I'm guessing that your churches have that same hetty and exasperating mix and I think that they desperately want their pastor to make a case for why all this matters. They don't want me is the

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pastor to condemn other people to hell, but I think they do want me to call out why I choose this particular weird little piece of turf that is mainline Christianity and to do that. I think I

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have to stop apologizing for the rest of Christianity and instead make a firm case for why what we do is different and sometimes that means calling other people out both on the spiritual but not religious left and on

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the conservative christian right and then challenging our own members to make their own case. I think mainline Protestants have a unique and precious contribution to make to the american religious landscape at just this moment in time,

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what can we tell the person who tells you that the broncos are favored by God? We can say from a tradition of thoughtfulness that God delights in the prayers of all people, whether they come from the

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cathedral, the mosque, the meeting house, the exam room, the doctor's office, the traffic jam , the homecoming dance, or even the football field . All prayers and praise are welcome. But what

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could we tell the person who is making all this up as she goes along but wonders if there's something deeper but still worries that the churches for simple minded people who believe in touchdown theology, we can say

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there is an in between the rigidity of touchdown theology and the sloppiness of make it up yourself spirituality. It's called a mature faith practiced in community and over time like that daffodil, not the fake daffodil on

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the chopstick, not the collection of blossoms in a store bought self selected bouquet, but a single sturdy daffodil that comes from a bulb planted in the earth grounded in tradition, centered in worship, called to