(The readings for the day were from Genesis 32, where Jacob wrestles with God; Romans 9, where Paul wrestles with his understanding of the church; and Matthew 14 where Jesus feeds the crowds)
A few weeks ago I got an email from a friend, which said, "I'm reading Howard Schultz's book, and it reminds me of the church." Now if you don't recognize his name right away, believe me - you'll be surprised to find out who Howard Schultz is. He's not a minister, or a professor, or a self-help guru. Howard Schultz is the founder and CEO of Starbucks. The coffee company. And he hits the nail on the head when it comes to the problem of the church in our time.
He's not trying to do this, of course. The name "God" doesn't make one appearance in Schultz's book. In no way does he attempt to describe the challenges faced by the body of Christ in the twenty-first century - and why would he? Onward is a business memoir, plain and simple. The weird thing is, Schultz's story of a company brought back from the edge is undeniably religious. And it's something we need to pay attention to not just because it's instructive, but because it calls all of us in the church on the carpet.
Some background information matters here. For one, what was the problem with Starbucks? Well on the surface, it looked like two things: runaway growth and a bad economy. Do you remember when it suddenly seemed like every other building you passed had a little green mermaid plastered to its window? I've actually been in a Starbucks and looked out, across the street directly into another Starbucks. (People joke about that, but it actually happened to me!) No matter how much you love iced green tea or decaf Pike Place, you know intuitively that there's something wrong with that. And three years ago now, right about the time when all of the deep, negative issues that come with that sort of unsustainable growth began to be unbearable for Starbucks, the economy tanked. Everything went into a tailspin, and people stopped buying expensive coffee.
This is when Schultz became the CEO of Starbucks for a second time. And the story he tells of risk and leadership, the way he paints a picture of this moment where Starbucks had to figure something out or that mermaid was sunk, has all of the dramatic, biblical flair of Jacob on the edge of a stream, in all-night hand-to-hand combat with God in human form. You would never guess it from your lectionary insert today, but the reason Jacob sends his family on ahead of him, the reason he's struggling and sleepless, the reason he demands to receive a blessing is that he, too, is in crisis. He’s in immediate, stomach-chewing danger from none other than Esau, the older brother whose inheritance he stole. Jacob ran away from home because Esau wanted to murder him; he's spent years and years at his uncle's place, has a family and some cows and some servants ... but now it’s time to go home. God calls Jacob to return to his kindred with everything he has - only it means crossing paths with Esau. And Esau hasn't done so badly for himself, either. In fact, when Jacob sends a messenger to warn Esau that he's approaching, the message he gets back is this: "Esau is coming. And he has four hundred men with him."
Four hundred armed warriors sort of makes angry shareholders look like another day at the office. And Jacob and Esau's bad economy - the give and take, the market of respect, compassion, and brotherly love that could exist between them - is every bit as uncertain as ours. But it has to change for the story to work. See, in order to be one of these Old Testament patriarchs - in order to be a father of Israel, like Jacob is - you have to live in the land that God promised to Abraham. At this point the story, Jacob can't carry on the family line and be living with his uncle, in a foreign place. He has to go home and claim his inheritance. So, as Ray noted last week, in order to pass faith in God on to untold generations of people through his descendants, Jacob has to get back, regardless of Esau. A whole kind of future depends on it.
But Esau isn't the moment of truth in all of this. The crucial step in Jacob's whole business of saving his family and his future is discovering who he really is. The thing that prepares Jacob to face Esau and prepares him to assume the responsibility of leadership is learning his true identity. Jacob is alone, in the dead of night, afraid of his brother, and God is suddenly there in human form, as though to say, "Don't wrestle with your brother – wrestle with what really matters." And Jacob shows up. Jacob puts up such a fight that God has to stop playing fair and wound him in the thigh in order to break it up. Because he has grappled so hard - because when he was pressed, Jacob pressed back - God gives him a new name, Israel, which means "one who strives with God" or "God strives." So Jacob becomes Israel, and Israel becomes who she will be, a people, including us, whose faith is built on a dynamic, restless, intimate, and ever-evolving relationship with God – with “what really matters.” Jacob limps away, marked not by loss but by the victory of knowing who he really is.
In the end, this was Howard Schultz' victory, too. During sleepless nights and early mornings as he wrestled with our seemingly god-like economy, the thing Schultz kept returning to was identity. In order to get back home, get back where it needed to be, Starbucks needed to know who it actually was. The company had lost its way and forfeited its soul in the pursuit of programs and products and more and more and more, and was in desperate need of what we might call a "come to Jesus" moment. In the book, this is where the real religion begins: the first word Schultz can think of to depict the essence of Starbucks is "love." He follows that up with "respect and dignity. Passion … Compassion, community. Authenticity." He says that if home is the "first place" in a person's life and work is a "second place," then a place like a coffeehouse is a "third place," where people can connect with one another and reconnect with themselves." His new mission statement begins, "To inspire and nurture the human spirit." And finally, Schultz cites an article from the Wall Street Journal written in the midst of 600 store closings, which observed that Starbucks stores are like "secular chapels" where "ritual abounds." The journalist lamented, "I don't go to Starbucks much. I don't go to the Baptist church, either. But I'm glad that we've got one just about everywhere."
Howard Schultz is obviously dramatic. But he's not wrong. Or rather, he's not wrong about the niche that Starbucks is filling, but he is wrong about how they're filling it. Starbucks' coffee is amazing. Starbucks' employees are lovely and are treated fairly. But Starbucks is selling you something, and that something is the idea of love, community, authenticity. Starbucks is banking - quite literally - on the fact that you long for these things, and the problem they faced a few years ago was that they'd forgotten what human beings lack. They were blind to our tender, emotional demands and were supplying something we didn't need. That was the problem with Starbucks.
The problem with the church is that we've forgotten that, too. For decades now the buzz has been declining numbers in all traditions, congregations losing members to death, life transitions, distraction, or disinterest and not replacing them. To this day, every issue of The Christian Century, a magazine that represents mainline Protestantism, or America, which represents a similar group of Roman Catholics, has some article about who's attending, who's not attending, why this is happening, and what we can do to stop it. People worry especially about the next generation of Christians, which is why the National Study of Youth and Religion, a huge project undertaken by scholars within the last few years, was so devastating with its insight that two-thirds of teenagers believe in God and have positive feelings toward church ... but only eight percent of them think that religion has anything to do with their everyday lives. One author, writing on the study, blamed the situation on what she calls "moralistic therapeutic deism" - the tendency of many churches to promote being nice, being friendly, and feeling good about yourself above being just, being honest, and working like a dog for the kingdom of heaven. But it can be more than this. It can be feeling trapped in ways of doing things that don't make sense anymore. It can be the pressure of an increasingly complicated world that is outpacing an institution that appears to be about the preservation of tradition only. Or it can be that the church tries to mirror that complicated world too much with too narrow of a focus on growth, too many activities, too much flux, too little silence and peace, so that its true identity, it's core essence, gets lost out there with everything else in a sea of soccer games, office parties, and mocha frappucinos.
One church in our own diocese felt this sense of stagnancy and desperation acutely and decided to explore it. Church of the Holy Spirit, an hour north of here in Lake Forest, took a survey - the same one we did - and uncovered a deep sense of untouched spiritual longing. Their rector responded by coming up with events and programs and classes and activities ... and still, nothing worked. So the church did something risky to pull itself back from the edge. They took another survey, which inventoried not their satisfaction with the parish, but their thoughts about God, their relationship with Jesus, their felt sense of the Holy Spirit, and their life of prayer. It was a hard thing to do. The language of this survey was more evangelical than anything most of us are used to, and it felt too private to many people to answer questions about their interior life of faith. But this is the thing that worked - actually, a better way to say it is that this is the thing that put the church to work. For the last eighteen months groups within Holy Spirit have been studying the Baptismal Covenant and the Bible and their own hearts; they've been trying to pray before meetings and incorporate spiritual practices into their daily routines; they've written spiritual autobiographies and participated in classes called "God sightings" where they try to figure out where and how grace is working in their lives and in the world around them. Not everybody is on board, and not everybody has been totally blown over, but parishioners who've committed themselves to this process report that they are experiencing something they’ve never experienced before.
Church of the Holy Spirit in Lake Forest is not us. The way the challenges of the church in the twenty-first century present themselves to it are different than how they present themselves here. But the overall situation is the same. And whatever we do to meet it now or at any time in our future is likewise the same: we have to discover our true identity. We have to find out who we really are. The good news is that like Holy Spirit, like Jacob, but unlike Starbucks, what we have is the real deal. Real love. Real community. Real relationship. Starbucks has a word for you that changes with each season, each campaign, each shift in the market - God's word for you is always the same: Yes. Starbucks closes - in the dead of night, on holidays, when the weather is bad. God is with you, even when you are searching for God's presence and not finding it ... you are assured that God is there. Starbucks wants to engage you in an economy of exchange, but what God has for you is free: freely given, freely received, free to all. Which is, finally, the last point - Starbucks doesn't have to serve you, but God wants nothing more than to fill your body with food. Jesus saw the crowds, had mercy on them and created substance, created nourishment out of almost nothing at all. We are those crowds, coming to him in need of everything, wondering how there could possibly be something for us here, yet after we eat with him, we’re not only satisfied - we become him. We become his hands and feet and heart and mouth so that the people we are when we are limping away from our encounter with God in this person are people who are changed, equipped, and empowered. People who have tasted and drunken something ... real.
That is who we really are. How we live it and what difference it makes for our life together and for every other life we touch will be our great victory. May God, who has given us the will to do these things give us the grace and power to perform them.
Sermon preached by the Reverend Danielle Thompson at St. Chrysostom's Episcopal Church in Chicago, IL on Sunday, July 31, 2011.
Cited:
Dean, Kenda Creasy. Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenager Is Telling the American Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Schultz, Howard. Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing its Soul (New York: Rodale Books, 2011).
