1762-2012

1762-2012 The Dover Church
January 22, 2012
Scripture: Deuteronomy 30, Matthew 3: 1-12

I doubt there are many pastors as blessed as I to be a church’s pastor during a 250th anniversary year and to have a member who is not only a professor of American Religious History, but a professor who has read hundreds of sermons by the first pastor of the church. Steve Marini, the saint in question, has taught me more about Benjamin Cary than I have known about any pastoral predecessor in any of the churches I have served, which is saying something when you think of the 250 years which have elapsed since Caryl’s ordination here on Meetinghouse Hill, or the 200 years which have elapsed since he died in harness as it were, still pastor to the people of the Springfield Parish of Dedham as we were then known. Steve has read 50 years of sermons.
Having said that, there is still plenty of room for the imagination. For example, I don’t imagine much was going on on Meetinghouse Hill on the third Sunday of January in 1762. The meetinghouse had been raised over the course of eleven years, in between planting and harvest, haying and timbering, but there was still interior finish work to be completed. An offer had been tendered by the Haven brothers, the first Deacons of the church, to a pastoral candidate from nearby Hopkinton by the name of Benjamin Caryl. Caryl would keep the Springfield folks waiting for another six or seven months as he discerned God’s will for his future. And religious life went on here in the western Dedham as it had since the first settlers crossed the river a hundred years before and planted a homestead on Strawberry Hill.
And what did that religious life look like? Well, the Springfield parish folks were not overly prosperous Puritan farmers. Before you jump to any assumptions about their religiosity, 130 years had passed since the first Puritans had hit the beaches of Salem and Boston, roughly 3-4 generations. In the first decade, over 20,000 Puritans had migrated with religious fervor as their primary motivation. With each passing generation, however, children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren cooled to the intensity of the faith experience which had burned so in the hearts of the first settlers. Church had become more of an institution than an experience and people drifted away, so much so that in 1750 the legislature in Boston passed a mandatory church attendance law. Here in the Springfield parish, those who wanted church could hear seminarians from Harvard who came out for a few weeks to practice their preaching in the unfinished meetinghouse, the occasional supply preacher from neighboring parishes, or could go by foot, horse or wagon the 4.5 miles to First Parish Needham, the 7 miles to First Parish, Dedham, the 5 miles to First Parish, Medfield, or the 3.5 miles to the Elliot Church in South Natick. Of course these distances were shorter depending on which part of town you lived in, but the point is that no one’s focus was on this church in the center of what was to become this town. Everyone was either oriented elsewhere, or just not interested. Sound familiar? We’ll come back to orientation in a moment.
Caryl preached essentially variations of one sermon for 50 years: “Turn yourselves around. Repent. Get back into relationship with God in Jesus Christ. Everything except Christ is folly.” 50 years of revival, and successful revival by all accounts, as the personal piety of the parishioners grew such that every home had a personal devotional altar by the time of Caryl’s death. Let us listen to an excerpt from the earliest series of Caryl sermons, to get a feel for the fervor and theology that would have emanated from Meetinghouse Hill and 107 Dedham Street 250 years ago:
“O we see what encouragement all sinners have to come to X who are Lost and see themselves so. They have all the encouragement in the world. There is a Savior provided, he is come. Who is he--O wonderful God and man in one person, most amazing, incomprehensible, Transcendently Glorious, wonderful Counselor. What has he done--humbled himself was made under the Law, took upon him the form of a Servant, lived a Life of perfect obedience, every way answering the precepts of the Law; yea, died shed his blood upon the Cross, Lay in the Grave till the third Day, then rose triumphant have conquered Death and [11] the Grave, and is ascended into Heaven where as an High Priest he is making intersession for his people. In a word he hath wrought out and brought in an everlasting Righteousness for all who believe.
Who did he do this for: for sinners, Lost wretched miserable sinners, undeserving, Hell deserving sinners. Those that cannot help themselves he came to save, he came to seek and to save that which was Lost; d therefore sinner why will not you put your trust in him. Is he not such a saviour as you want. Able and to Save the . Is the guilt of thy sin Great? But is not the merit of his Blood which was the Blood of God greater. Will it not Disappear when thou Beholdest the Great Sacrifice? The Bondage thou art under to sin is Great, but he can Loose? Art thou Lost and cannot find X, be not discouraged. He can find thee. Is thy heart hard. Look to him. He can soften it. Is thy Conscience defiled? Look to him he can purge it; is thy will stubborn Look to him he can bare it. Is thy affections drawn of[f]from God Look to him. He can Regulate them. Nay let the case be ever so Bad Look to Him. He can heal that very business to seek and to save that which is lost.

Yea he is inviting thee to put thy trust in Him and he will save thee, there is a foundation stronger than Heaven and earth for thee to found thy faith upon.
Therefore be persuaded to believe in him that he may save thee from all thy miseries, for those that Believe in this Glorious saviour. He will save even from the inherence of sin, deliver them from the temptations they are exposed to, an from the Trouble of this present Life as we have heard. So that at Last he will bring them to perfect Bliss and Glory. Wherefore all the SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF GOD BE OF GOOD CHEAR and walk with a dependance upon him and be strong in him.”
Be of good cheer, sons and daughters! Maybe not the first emotional response we might have to such a sermon. Way too fear and consequences based for us, perhaps. Way too much off putting, complicated and even incomprehensible God talk. But if we translate it into terms which resonate for us, terms of freedom for new life, freedom for abundant life, joy in this life….well, now we’re talking Good News, aren’t we? Not burn in a bad way, but get on fire. Who doesn’t want to be enthusiastic? Excited? On fire? Which brings me from 1762 to 2012 and how all of this speaks to us today.
I would argue that we find ourselves in a situation right now much like Caryl faced 250 years ago. The glory days of American Protestantism was the 1950s and 60s, when everyone went to church, new buildings were built (see Kraft Hall), and Sundays Schools were overflowing. We were the establishment, right up there with the schools, town government, the police, the armed forces, the Boy Scouts. Many of our older members remember that time when our church was filled, a pillar of the community. I remember them from my childhood in the 60s and 70s. Being the establishment is quite a different thing from being on fire, and as people began to distrust the establishment and institutions in the 60s until now, they drifted away. Today, we live in a community of over 5000 people, less than 700 of whom find their way into any house of worship on a regular basis. Most of our neighbors are un-churched folks, church-resistant folks, turned-off-by-church folks, people who have been bored to death by bad theology, weak as water theology, irrelevant theology, and all the rest. You know these folks. They say “I’m spiritual but not religious!” or “A lot of what happens in church on Sunday mornings doesn’t “work” for me.” Or “I tried church, but it didn’t speak to me. It was sort of boring.” They either didn’t find what they were looking for when they tried church, or didn’t expect to find anything in the first place so they didn’t bother looking. My friends, we live in a theological wilderness of people who either just don’t care or are completely turned off. But the good news is that the God they don’t believe in is a god we wouldn’t be bothered believing in either. The way of life that they think would be boring, uptight, judgmental, constrained, old fashioned, is not the way of life we are trying to live our way into. The church they don’t want to be part of wouldn’t interest me either. In short, we have an enormous opportunity to introduce people to God in Jesus Christ, a God of joy and love, abundant life and community, of amazing and boundless love and possibility, to open peoples’ eyes to the open system of thinking and being which we know in Jesus, rather than the closed down, limited and limiting system of thinking and being they think we are part of. To paraphrase and translate Caryl, “Be happy people. Walk with God in your lives and feel the life.” Amen.