In Cultures of the Religious Right today, we listened to a recording of a sermon of Rick Warren's on how to make wise choices. (I picked this CD up at the church three years ago; none were available at my recent visit.) I copied for students the worksheets with blanks to fill in, and all of us wrote down in our own handwriting that fear makes people sarcastic, shirk responsibility, stubborn and shortsighted, the need to get the facts, count the costs, plan your steps, announce your goal, step out in faith, do it in love, etc. I thought it brilliant to start with an attack on sarcasm ("it's insecure people's way of protecting their insecurity," he assured us), as this disables one kind of dismissive response to his deliberately prosaic preaching right from the outset. You're scoffing? This must threaten you somehow.This was my fourth time to hear this sermon, and I was struck anew by its artful artlessness. It's not just that there is something for the audience to write down or circle every few minutes, just as one's attention starts to wander. Not just that it's full of earthy folk wisdom and friendly humor. It's that it can be heard at so many levels, from (1) an entry level where the message is entirely secular, the Biblical references merely a helpful set of metaphors, to (2) progressively more Biblical levels, where we realize that he's describing a "Biblical way of living" and not just a wise and successful one, and ending with (3) levels where miracles happen for the faithful, and hell awaits those who are too proud and presumptuous to pray. We'd just finished reading Susan Harding's analysis of the rhetoric of Jerry Falwell's ministry, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics, and it was illuminating to see how different Warren is from Falwell, but also how he uses some of the same tropes.
(I was going to write that Falwell would never have posed for a photo in a pool, but Harding includes a picture of him going down a water slide, fully clothed, in the PTL theme park.) (I wonder what wit decided to turn the Warren picture upside down for it's not-quite-parody of the risen Christ.) (And what kind of pool is that exactly?)One theme was crossing the Red Sea, which Warren amusingly paraphrased - in a manner immediately comprehensible to his exurban Orange County congregation - as "God's cul-de-sac." Trapped between the sea, cliffs and Pharaoh's approaching armies, God has Israel just where he wanted it, and when we face our own Red Seas, he has us just where he wants us, too. At this point, God wants us to take risks. If we take wise risks, and make a public declaration of our goals, God will help us achieve them - as he helped Warren achieve the aims of his ministry when he founded Saddleback a quarter century before and declared his intention to create a large community on its own large piece of land, or when he, more recently, called for 3000 hosts to have small group meetings in their houses and got more than 3200. "What is your own personal Red Sea right now," he asked genially?
This is a good example of something you could take in a number of different ways. "Red Sea" may be just another way of saying "tough choices you need to make," and it is probably true that in the face of such a choice making a declaration of your goals is a good idea. But of course the People of Israel didn't just say "we gotta go through it" and swim; God got them out of the cul-de-sac by having his agent, Moses, command the waters to part. They were saved by a miracle, and a courageous leader who disregarded their sarcasm, shirking, stubbornness and shortsightedness. So you can take a self-help message from Warren, or a quite different one: God works miracles, and you'd better accept that and expect them. And, if you're prone to scoff, you may need a strong leader. And what about the rest of the story? Do we need to ask ourselves who Pharaoh and his armies right now are, for whom God has planned a different Red Sea experience?
What's fascinated me from the start is the sliding scale in everything I've encountered at Saddleback. It's never all-or-nothing. You can start on the journey with an effortless baby step, or even find yourself already on the way: I thought it was just his good common sense advice I was seeking and following, but now I find that it's been something more for some time already. Like their "campus," which looks entirely secular - like a community college - until you look and notice a slender crucifix high above, and a baptismal pool tucked around a corner. The garden, full of fake rocks and fun trails for kids (see below; for more pictures), is in fact a prayer garden, with scenes - unmarked - of 40 Bible stories for you to discover, once you've read those stories, and once you know to look for them in the garden.
I'm sure there's plenty more, and can imagine the pleasure of discovering successive layers of meaning.For Warren-like preachers, that's the way to win back the unchurched for Jesus - incrementally, with no forced decisions, no embarrassing altar calls or public hand-waving, and none of the moralistic holier-than-thou posturing many associate with churches. For his critics, it seems like a way for people to go through the motions without ever actually making the decisive commitment: Warren never talks about sin or salvation, at least not explicitly. But I suspect that if you got deeper into his world, took the courses and joined a small group, you'd learn to hear that, too, at work in his sermons. (Is it not sin that makes us scoff?) He speaks in a kind of code the unsuspecting first-time-goer would never notice.
It's brilliant rhetoric, but also unnerving - you'll recall that I was spooked to find a book on spirit warfare, blurbed by Warren, in the bookshop at my last visit. I won't be sarcastic about it; it frightens me. I know where he's coming from, but I don't know where he's going.
