Our Iceberg Is Melting

Anton DeWet

Isaiah 11:1-9 & Bishop Oscar Romero, 10 December, 1978

Our Iceberg Is Melting is a book based on the award-winning work of Harvard’s John Kotter and is a modern parable about penguins living on an iceberg, as they have been living for many, many generations. Then one curious bird discovers a potentially devastating problem. Their ice berg is melting.

The characters in the story, Fred, Alice, Louis, Buddy, the professor, and NoNo, are like people we recognize – even ourselves. Their tale is one of resistance to change and heroic action, seemingly intractable obstacles and the most clever tactics for dealing with those obstacles.

This challenge to humanity is not new.

In the previous century there was more change brought about through the discovery of knowledge and science than in the previous 8,000 years.

It is said that what took humanity 5000 years to discover knowledge wise was doubled in just 100 years—the 20th century. But you ain’t seen nothing yet according to these social commentators.

They say that in 20 years technology will be become outdated every 7 days. Our colleges are now training our children for technology that does not exist today.

May we never make the mistake of underestimating the impact of these facts on our present day lives from a sociological point of view.

We may not think about it in this way, but we live totally different lives from those of our grandparents and their parents. These changes affect the way we see the world, the way we look at other people, the way we look at the earth in relationship to other our long term survival. Our social structures are continually influenced by these tendencies which ultimately impacts how we think about God and thus, our faith. God has evolved in the human mind over the past century and so has faith and our expressions of faith.

Our world has changed forever but somehow the church appears to live in a state of denial when it comes to change.

In fact, when we see the absence of generations of young people in our churches we must understand that the church has become a foreign place filled with traditions and expressions that these younger generations do not understand nor value any longer, not because they are arrogant, but because the church still lives caught in the mold of the 19th century with its music, its hymns, its monologue sermons, and its outdated organization. And one of the reasons the ice berg is melting is the absence of younger generations.

What to do? Where to go from here?

The first is to recover from our state of denial and to understand that the world has evolved and if we do not do something to help our church communities to evolve with it, the penguins on this melting ice berg will go the way of the Dodo bird.

The second is to understand the dynamics of new life. In a stagnated and devastated world where the ice berg had melted for the people, the prophet Isaiah spoke of new life that will come forth out of the stump of the devastated tree…a symbol for the lineage of King David, the hero of the Israelites. He says in today’s reading, a new branch will sprout from this assumed lifeless stump or Jesse, and this new branch will be the beginning of a new understanding of the world…and this new world will be a place where, in his words, “The wolf will romp with the lamb, the leopard sleep with the kid. Calf and lion will eat from the same trough…” In other words, the powerful and powerless will learn to coexist in harmony with one another. This new time will be a time of justice where people would work for peace and coexistence. Self interest will make way for a world of sharing and caring.

In Matthew, the first chapter, there is a long genealogy of Jesus which leads us from Abraham to Jesse, the father of King David, to Jesus…obviously meant as a play on this chapter in Isaiah, thereby confirming Jesus to be this new branch that grew from the stump of Jesse. The hope that Isaiah had announced becomes clear in Jesus, the one who taught that a new kingdom was at hand, but this was no ordinary kingdom—it was the Kingdom of God. In this kingdom the wolf would romp with the lamb, and the leopard would sleep near the baby goat and the calf and the lion would eat at the same trough.

Obviously, Jesus preaches a new paradigm for his time and in his preaching he exposes the immorality of those who are successful in hoarding goods and money at the expense of others, and where the common wealth of the land is not shared equitably he attacks the status quo. He too, speaks of this hope, this vision of Isaiah and the tension between the world as we know it and the world God is calling us to help co-create.

But with Jesus, his calls come to the ears of the authorities and they know that if he persists and people buy into this new found vision, they stood to loose too much and so they killed him on a cross.

In 1978 Bishop Oscar Romero, archbishop of El Salvador, said in response to the injustices so prevalent in his country:

“Who will put a prophet’s eloquence into my words to shake from their inertia all those who kneel before the riches of the earth – who would like gold, money, lands, power, political life to be their everlasting gods? All that is going to end.

There will remain only the satisfaction of having been, in regard to money or political life, a person faithful to God’s will. One must learn to manage the relative and transitory things of earth according to his will, not make them absolutes.”

Romero, realized that the iceberg that he lived on was melting and his prophetic voice spoke boldly to this dream of God’s prophets before him for a new vision which would ensure that justice would prevail.

As with Jesus, the officialdom was listening and 2 years later, in 1980, as he finished his sermon during Mass, Romero was assassinated at the altar of his church. It is said that his blood splattered the altar on which the elements of bread and wine for communion stood prepared.

Friends of Faith Church, I hate to bring you this message, but our iceberg is melting and we have to make a choice as to whether we are going to be Penguins or Dodo Birds.

We have lost a number of generations who find the church an inhospitable place for them to be. They feel neither welcome nor missed. When they come they are relegated to the status of those who are wonderful to be seen as long as they are not heard…especially when it comes to their music or their weird ideas about worship.

12 years ago when I started here at Faith Church our acolytes were forced to dress in ridiculous robes with white gloves and God knows, even I would not do that to my worst enemy, but when we abolished it we heard all about it.

And our iceberg kept melting. None of those children are part of this congregation anymore. I wonder whether 20% ever set foot in any church after they left their parent’s home.

When we adapt our worship experience it is not an arbitrary brainwave that struck us but it’s a way to experiment in making our worship event an experience that accommodates all of us, young and old…traditional and unorthodox, church members who have been here for 40 years and longer and those who have only just arrived and still find this place threatening and weird. Try achieving that.

But when we play music of the 1800’s with instruments that are virtually extinct as far as our younger generation goes, are we surprised that they cannot find any value in our service?

Change is at hand as this ice berg melts and we had better either learn to swim with the new flow of life or we too will loose the battle and run into dead ends in times to come.

We need a new vision for the future. We have seen new members come on board who are different from the members who were here 10-12-20 and 40 years ago. They are excited about our church and what we stand for and they have energy they would like to put to use but they cannot if we keep on reminding them that “this is not the way we used to do it.” We need a permission giving vision so we can experiment and make mistakes, learn from them and carry on with our vision of being a Christian community.

We need people who can make this new vision become an active new life of this church…an active new ministry…and we need to develop the ability to embrace change and work with it as a tool of redemption from this crisis as our ice berg melts away.

Today we celebrate new members who have sensed that Faith Church can offer them what they miss and what they find worth committing themselves to. Allow these new members to bring their gifts to bear on our congregation. Join with them and allow them into this new vision for our future.

We need to create a new culture here at Faith Church, a culture of renewal and commitment. A culture where we regain our passion to share with others our understanding of God’s inclusive love for all people as Jesus taught us. A culture where we do not sulk and give up when we don’t get to do it the way it used to be. Too often those who feel they are losing too much of their tradition give up and go join another group whose ice berg is melting but who is still determined not to notice it nor do something about it.

Don’t give up. Come join this faith adventure.

We are in the first Sunday of Advent—the season of expectation. We are expecting a new vision in Jesus Christ and if we look past the symbolism of the birth story and we already see glimpses of the calling of the disciples, the ministry in Galilee, the road to Jerusalem and the cross which turned into a triumph.

Faith Church needs you and we need you now. We cannot spare a single person who does not buy into our vision—the same vision Isaiah and Jesus shared, and the same vision the Oscar Romeros of this world share with us.

“Come build God’s kingdom with us, on earth as it is in heaven.” What can be more exciting than that. By the time this ice berg melts completely this is the bunch of penguins I hope to be with because I believe in you and your ability to do anything God calls us to do. Let’s go forward in the precious name of Jesus, our Christ. After all, we are no Dodos! Amen.