Sermons and Shepherds

The older and/or more informed I become, the more trouble I have with the idea of the "sermon".
I understand and embrace the "worship" portion of church services, because it brings the congregation together in a communal experience of emotion and music.

But then instead of sending us on our way at the peak of that communal experience, we're jarred out of it to be lectured at as individuals for the remainder of the service (in some cases taking up half or 3/4 of the total service time).

This would be fine on its own, if structured like a college class, which focused only on the individual intellect, at a separate time and/or place from communal worship.

But jarring us out of our communal emotional experience just to be talked at, and then sending us out after THAT, makes the joys of the communal experience seem wasted and trod under.

Especially since a sermon, unlike a college lecture, doesn't even allow anyone being lectured to to raise a hand and ask questions.
A sermon is the antithesis of a conversation, and too many pastors use the captivity of their audiences to spew some truly awful drivel.

What confuses me is that most churches HAVE a separate activity to invoke the individual intellect.
It usually happens pre-service in Sunday School classes, or throughout the week in small-group Bible studies or discussion groups.

Why can't that be enough?

Why do we still need the authority figure from on high passing supposedly-irrefutable wisdom down to us lowly sheep?

Especially in our current age of unlimited information.

We should be having the best conversations about God and spirituality in the history of humanity!

Not sitting quietly and pretending to listen to someone else talk at us while drawing or playing on our phones.
Just a thought.


On an unrelated note, having left the image of the "good shepherd" at least a couple centuries behind us in the developed world, we need a new metaphor for God and really really REALLY need a new metaphor for Jesus.

But having made the mistake of literalizing our metaphors about a thousand years ago, and at some point between then and now turned that mistake into a multibillion-dollar business and lobbying empire, I doubt any new metaphors would really take.

It's a mark of how weak metaphor and symbolism are in our current American culture that churches STILL feel the need to explain the imagery of the baptism EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. IT. HAPPENS.

Explanations of imagery are what anthropologists do when examining another culture.
Those WITHIN the culture don't ever need an explanation because everyone knows the ritual's purpose.

But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised, given that we have taken imagery, symbolism, and metaphor which are supposed to fill a niche in the human psyche, and transformed them quite against all sense into "inerrant Word of God", and given them the same level of gravitas we give plain facts.

This move to make literal what should have remained figurative has naturally and tragically caused an intellectual backlash against any and all imagery ever associated with religion.

Too many have thrown out baby and bathwater, assuming that spiritual matters which psychologists have found we NEED to remain SANE and remain coherent as a society, are not only unnecessary, but are either a plague to be cured or the quaint/barbaric practices of a less-enlightened age to be outgrown on our way to utopia.

Instead of each society subscribing to its own rites and rituals and STORIES to fill the niche in their collective psyche, somewhere along the way a few of them became convinced that their stories were the only "real" ones, their deity/ies the only "real" ones.

Even though their fathers and grandfathers had never stopped to decry anyone else's stories unless at war, usually over something actually-real like food or land or resources, and that defamation was mostly a formality.

Societies such as the Greeks and Egyptians and African tribes and Native Americans were content with an unspoken, "It's real to use in our circumstances," and content (or rather, constrained by a harsh life and low life-expectancy) with letting others worship who, what, and how they would.

From a certain perspective, we in the infinitely-connected-to-infinite-information seem less able to deal with the part of our psyche which needs spirituality for communal bonding and communal action than our barbaric ancestors.

We know more about the universe and the human body and the human psyche than any generation before us, but having turned their metaphors into "facts," and caused the backlash which resulted when reason was attacked by irrationality, we seem unable to truly recover.
We are thus compartmentalized by our more recent ancestors' mistakes, with too many elders clinging to that mistake as if by divine command, and too many youngers abandoning spirituality wholesale because some are willing to kill to defend the mistake.


There doesn't seem to be any solution to our fragmented state.
Having shed the rituals and rites of our ancestors, which helped us process the greater truths of the universe, in the fight against the literalization of metaphor, we find ourselves naked before the terrifying cosmos, unable to go back into our shell and unable to truly strike out on our own.

We shed the rites and rituals, but we could not change the fundamental nature of our psyche, and thus we lack one of the first tools for comprehending the universe which our distant ancestors developed in the darkness of pre-history.


Time will tell if we have truly taken ourselves out of the evolutionary pool, or if this is simply the next evolutionary hurdle we must overcome.