Our Gilded Age

In our continuing series on the prophets, Isaiah confronts the way religion had been gilded and our call to day

See Isaiah 58

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Transcript

Sermons from 

Mission Hills UCC

San Diego, California

Rev. Dr. David Bahr

david.bahr@missionhillsucc.org

August 17, 2025

“Our Gilded Age”

Isaiah 58: 9b-12 – Common English Bible

Then you will call, and the Lord will answer;
     you will cry for help, and God will say, “I’m here.”
 If you remove the yoke from among you,
     the finger-pointing, the wicked speech;
 10     if you open your heart to the hungry,
     and provide abundantly for those who are afflicted,
     your light will shine in the darkness,
     and your gloom will be like the noon.
 11 The Lord will guide you continually
     and provide for you, even in parched places.
     He will rescue your bones.
 You will be like a watered garden,
     like a spring of water that won’t run dry.
 12 They will rebuild ancient ruins on your account;
     the foundations of generations past you will restore.
 You will be called Mender of Broken Walls,
     Restorer of Livable Streets.

Art and I have a favorite TV show that just ended its third season far too-short — The Gilded Age.  Creator Julian Fellowes of Downton Abbey fame describes it as a time of “dizzying, brilliant ascents and calamitous falls, of record-breaking ostentation and savage rivalry — a time when money was king.”  I probably shouldn’t like the show as much as I do, but it’s fascinating to imagine New York City in the 1880s and see the mansions built to rival palaces, absolutely amazing costumes, and churches.  Architecturally stunning real churches as sets – the kind that were all over Cleveland.  I belonged for a time to Pilgrim Congregational Church, a Gilded Age church on a hill that overlooked the steel mills below, which hints at what the show doesn’t fully represent.  Outside those grand doors, the Gilded Age did not glitter for real people.  It was brutal.

That was the world Walter Rauschenbusch stepped into when he was ordained at age 23 and started his first pastorate in Hell’s Kitchen in 1886.  His church sat at the edge of slaughterhouses and saloons, where families crowded into single rooms and sewage ran in the streets. He is said to have buried 500 children in eleven years.  Funerals became his weekday rhythm — tiny caskets, grieving parents.  Each graveside shook him more.

At first, Walter thought his job was saving their souls for heaven.  But the longer he walked those streets, walking among women and men whose bodies were crushed by factory life – sometimes literally – the more he questioned — what kind of gospel preaches heaven and ignores Hell’s Kitchen?   Walter wasn’t the only one questioning.  

In contrast, in Columbus, Ohio, Washington Gladden was the pastor of a very prestigious First Congregational Church.  His sermons ran in the Monday paper and were read by thousands.  He was no firebrand.  He was respectable, cautious, the kind of minister businessmen liked to hear on Sunday.

But in 1884, the Hocking Valley coal strike.  Before the strike, he heard stories of miners and their families paid so little they couldn’t buy bread, children with no shoes for winter, mothers begging neighbors for coal scraps to keep their children warm.  As the strike dragged into its second year, deputies were sent in with rifles to break it.  

Gladden couldn’t avoid the headlines and decided to speak out in a sermon.  But first, he didn’t want to blindside one of the congregation’s most prominent members — Joseph Jeffrey, the magnate of mining equipment.  Saturday night, Rev. Gladden went to Mr. Jeffrey’s home and told him what he planned to say.

To his credit, Mr. Jeffrey wasn’t happy but he still came to church the next morning.  He listened as Gladden declared that the gospel extends past the factory gates, that the yoke of low wages and endless hours is not the fast God chooses.

On Monday morning his sermon was again in the paper, where thousands more read it.  It actually changed the conversation in Columbus.  For the business community, it was a shock: one of “their own” churches calling it out.  But for the miners, it meant at least one pastor saw their struggle as holy.  That mattered.  

Something else remarkable happened:  Joseph Jeffrey stayed in the pews and over time his own company became known for unusually progressive policies.  He opened one of the nation’s first infirmaries inside a factory, started a cooperative store so workers could buy goods at fair prices, and launched a fund to help employees purchase homes.

The strike eventually ended under many pressures, but Gladden’s sermon left its mark.  He dared to say from the pulpit what the prophets had always said — that God stands with the workers whose backs bear the weight of another’s wealth.  He cracked open a whole city’s imagination of what faith could demand.  

In cities across the country, the Spirit was moving.  Pastors were coming to the same conclusion without knowing they were part of a movement. Out of the Gilded Age, the Social Gospel was born—the conviction that sin is not only personal but social.  That there are sins woven into our systems.  And churches began to respond.

Pilgrim Congregational in Cleveland was a vivid example of Gilded Age churches enacting the Social Gospel.  Their new building was gorgeous—so much so it was featured at the Paris Exhibition in 1900 as “epoch-making.”  But what set it apart was not just the striking opulence of the sanctuary.  Two-thirds of the building was devoted to community use.  It housed a library to teach literacy.  It had a bowling alley and a full gymnasium to provide recreation.  There were spaces—lots of them—for health care and for citizenship classes.  And even though its pews held many of Cleveland’s elite, its walls bore witness to a gospel that pressed outward in service.  

But Pilgrim and churches like it didn’t stop at service.  Social Gospel churches called for city reforms — cleaner water, child labor laws, workplace safety, public education.  They organized.  They helped to shape the Progressive Era’s push for anti-trust laws, minimum wage, women’s suffrage, and housing reforms.  All of which still need reform.  Their buildings were sanctuaries of service as well as launching pads for justice.  That’s how churches like these made the prophets flesh.  That’s our UCC legacy.  Which, of course, begs the question for us too.

Gladden and Rauschenbusch and many others made the prophets very real.  Isaiah wasn’t just an ancient voice on a scroll.  Because long before the chandeliers in Fifth Avenue ballrooms, there was another gilded age—Jerusalem.  The temple courts were full of robes sweeping across marble floors.  Sacrifices smoked on the altar.  Incense rose in the air.  Religion gleamed like gold.  Everything looked orderly, faithful, holy.

But Isaiah saw through the shine — through the gild.  On the streets outside the temple were widows who had lost their homes.  He watched merchants tip the scales and swallow the wages of the poor.  He heard the cries of workers who toiled for bread crumbs while the rich feasted.  Perhaps it had always been that way, but he saw the breach widening — and the cracks covered over with ritual.

Isaiah raised his voice: “Day after day they seek me, they delight to know my ways!  But is this not the fast I choose:  to loose the chains of injustice, to set the oppressed free, to share your bread with the hungry, to bring the homeless poor into your house?”  Isaiah insists:  God does not want empty rituals.  Other prophets were more blunt:  God hates your empty rituals.

And Jesus?  He could not have been clearer.  His first sermon quoted Isaiah directly.  Free the captives!  And look at this morning’s gospel.  He is teaching in the synagogue when he sees a woman bent over for eighteen years.  Imagine eighteen years of staring at the ground.  Eighteen years of being told you are cursed.  Eighteen years of being invisible to everyone in the room.

But not to Jesus.  He sees her and stops.  He calls her forward and lays his hands on her.  And she stands up straight for the first time in nearly two decades.  The leaders are furious.  Not because she was healed, but because it happened on the Sabbath.  The rules had been broken.  The ritual disrupted.

But Jesus will not gild religion with rules while people suffer.  He says:  “You hypocrites!  You untie your animals on the Sabbath to give them water — should not this daughter of Abraham be set free?”  Why not today? 

Jesus spoke comfort to her and countless others:  “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.  Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.”  But did he mean someday, in heaven, or did he mean now?  The Social Gospel, like Liberation Theology today, insists: now.  On earth, as it is in heaven.  For chains to fall off, backs unbend, lives restored.  It was true in Isaiah’s day.  It was true in Jesus’ synagogue.  And it is just as true in our time.  Because, have you noticed, we are living in our own gilded age.

Back in the Gilded Age of the 1880s and 90s, tycoons hoarded fortunes.  Railroad and steel barons dictated politics like it was their private company.  Some became great philanthropists.  But through tariffs and monopolies, wealth piled higher and higher into the hands of a few as the poor suffered.  Why would anyone want to go back to that — except the very few?

And yet today, the playbook of Christian nationalism is the same old Gilded Age in new clothes.  It waves the cross, wraps the Bible around political power, and preaches “family values” while driving the cost of food so high that families can’t afford the basics — eliminating health care, cancer research, food safety — all so the bank accounts of the obscenely wealthy can grow.  Isaiah thunders, “Is this the fast that I choose?!”

• It shouts “religious freedom” while stripping freedom from LGBTQ people.  Isaiah thunders, “seriously!?  Really?  That’s what’s important?”
• It invokes “biblical womanhood” to keep women silent.  Tell me, then who would have told the disciples hiding in fear that Jesus is risen?
• It praises “law and order” while masked men drag Black and Brown neighbors away in broad daylight — their faces covered as they tear communities apart, while gilded pulpits cheer them on.  A complete betrayal of scripture’s repeated command:  “Any immigrant who lives with you must be treated as if they were one of your citizens. You must love them as yourself, because you were immigrants in the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God.”  Leviticus 19: 33-34.[1]  Numerous citations from the books of Exodus, Deuteronomy, Numbers, Jeremiah, Ezekiel.  Jesus makes it personal:  to welcome the stranger, is to welcome him; to reject the stranger is to reject him.  The Bible tells me so.

Isaiah thunders: “Is this the fast that I choose — a religion that props up power and calls it holy?  Or is it to loose the chains of injustice, to set the oppressed free… But, he continues: “If… If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil… if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness.”

Isaiah calls this repairing the breach.  And that is what the world needs — not new forms of gilded sanctuaries, but communities willing to pour their abundance into healing.  And Isaiah promises: when we join in that repair, our light will rise together in the darkness.  It may feel far away, but I believe it is what God is already stirring among us.

• Because every time we fill bags with produce for our neighbors in the parking lot, we are repairing the breach. The free meal and activity program about to begin for seniors will do that too.  Every time we build a house in Tijuana and affordable housing in Mission Hills.
• Every time we support mission partners like the Southern California Immigration Project, Barrio Logan College Institute, Wildfire Relief…
• Every time we sing of joy and sing of lament in worship, or pray for one another.  Every time we dig below the surface of scripture and delve further in… we are repairing the breach.
• Every time someone who has felt harmed by the church walks by our building and sees our rainbow flag, we are repairing the breach.
• Every Sunday School lesson and youth group meeting becomes preparation for prophetic leaders who will one day repair the breach.

Feeding, housing, and welcoming are holy — but the breach won’t be repaired until we also challenge the systems that cause hunger and homelessness in the first place.  Our rainbow flag heals a wound, but our voices must also confront the laws and policies as they try to erase LGBTQ lives.  Repair is both service and justice, both compassion and confrontation.  That is the Social Gospel’s true legacy — and that’s what, I believe, we are called to lean into.  The work God has in store for us today.

So let’s keep at it.  Let’s keep showing up for one another, for the hungry and the hurting, for those bent low under life’s weight.  Let us keep stitching our communities together with bread and love.  But let’s step out even further with truth and justice.  Deeper into the gospel which was shaped by the prophets.  In our own gilded age, this is the work God has given us to do.  

So may we rise with that light.  May we be called repairers of the breach.  And may it be so. Amen. 

[1]
Torah (Pentateuch)
·         Exodus 12:49 – “The same law applies both to the native-born and to the foreigner residing among you.”
·         Exodus 22:21 (CEB) – “Don’t mistreat or oppress an immigrant, because you were once immigrants in the land of Egypt.”
·         Exodus 23:9 – “Don’t oppress an immigrant. You know what it’s like to be an immigrant, because you were immigrants in the land of Egypt.”
·         Leviticus 19:33–34 – (already cited) “Any immigrant who lives with you must be treated as if they were one of your citizens. You must love them as yourself…”
·         Leviticus 24:22 – “There is but one law for everyone, whether citizen or immigrant who dwells with you.”
·         Numbers 15:15–16 – “The community will have the same regulations for you and for the foreigner residing with you; this is a lasting ordinance… You and the foreigner shall be the same before the LORD.”
·         Deuteronomy 10:18–19 – “God… loves immigrants, giving them food and clothing. And you must love immigrants, because you were immigrants in the land of Egypt.”
·         Deuteronomy 24:17–18 – “Don’t deprive immigrants or orphans of justice… Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and that the LORD your God redeemed you from there.”
·         Deuteronomy 24:19–22 – commands leaving gleanings of harvest for “the immigrant, the orphan, and the widow.”
·         Deuteronomy 26:11–13 – includes the immigrant in the community’s joy and in the tithe for those in need.
·         Deuteronomy 27:19 – “Cursed is anyone who withholds justice from the foreigner, the orphan or the widow.”
Prophets & Writings
·         Jeremiah 7:6–7 – “If you don’t oppress the immigrant, the orphan, and the widow… then I will let you live in this place.”
·         Jeremiah 22:3 – “Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow.”
·         Ezekiel 22:7, 29 – condemns Israel for mistreating immigrants and the vulnerable.
·         Ezekiel 47:22 – “You are to allot it as an inheritance for yourselves and for the foreigners residing among you… they are to be considered as native-born Israelites.”
·         Zechariah 7:10 – “Do not oppress the widow or the orphan, the immigrant or the poor.”
·         Malachi 3:5 – God testifies “against those who oppress the hired worker, the widow, and the orphan, against those who thrust aside the immigrant…”