August 24, 2014
Texts:
Mark 12:18a, 24, 28-34
Romans 1:16-17
I love the metaphor of geese flying in formation. The V-formation conserves energy for the flock as the front goose breaks the headwind which makes flying easier for the rest. Moreover, geese honk as they fly. This is to encourage the lead goose to give all he/she has for a concentrated time after which the lead goose will drop back into the formation as another goose takes the point. By flying in formation and encouraging leadership by quacking geese can fly incredible distances without stopping. This is a graphic example of an 8th Day value: shared leadership.
As your lead goose for the next 30 minutes I want to guide us to work with a critical question for 8th Day and every other church in the Church of the Saviour tradition: how do we in this tradition conserve the understandings and commitment that gave us solid footing and at the same time adapt to a new situation? I would appreciate your honking from time to time if something I say touches you.
The Radical Difference between mid-20th century when C of S started and early 21st
The Christianity in which Church of the Saviour was born in the 1940s and 50s was at its apex in terms of social status, size of membership, institutional wealth, influence, and perhaps most important of all – shared vocabulary. Given its status, Christianity had a voice that was listened to nationally and locally.
In the 1960s its standing began to change first gradually and then noticeably–from ascent to decline which in the early 21st century is now very obvious. Douglas John Hall in Waiting for Gospel notes a study of trends of church decline as evidenced by a steadily increasing number of citizens indicating that they have “no religious affiliation.” The hypothesis of this study was that this trend becomes self-reinforcing to the point of virtual extinction when it reaches a tipping point based on two sociological principles: 1) it is more attractive to be part of the majority than the minority, and 2) there are social, political and economic advantages to being unaffiliated in countries where religion is in decline – the same as to be affiliated when the trend is in ascent.
Based on data the study predicts that religion in general and Christianity in particular will be driven to extinction by the end of the century in the following countries: Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland, and Switzerland. The researchers say they cannot make predictions about the US because the US census doesn’t ask questions about religion.
The problem with Christianity’s status at its height of popularity following WW II was its shallowness. The C of S was conceived as an alternative to the shallow commitment and watered-down faith in most traditional churches. Its radical commitment was the basis for the public attention it received through an initial article in Readers Digest and the subsequent books by Elizabeth O’Connor. Like the early Christian church, the C of S proclaimed and embodied a message that awakened men and women to possibilities for human life that they had lost or never entertained. According to Hall,
in its first two or three hundred years, Christianity was largely dependent for its existence upon the new zest for life that was awakened in people who heard and were, as they felt, transformed by the Christian gospel and at various and sundry points in subsequent history the Christian movement has found itself revitalized by the spirit of that same ‘good news’ in ways that spoke to the specifics of their times and places.
In sum, all kinds of evidence indicate that the wind has shifted from behind us into our face as a church. To give one tiny example, the board and staff of the Potter’s House have been working for several months with how to represent itself as a mission of this church. A recent issue of the City Paper picked up on the controversy over the mural on the outside of the Potter’s House. The brief article concluded by quoting one person who said the problem is not the mural but the fact of the Potter’s House being run by a church. When the Potter’s House started in the 1960s, the Church of the Saviour was congratulated far and wide for its originality and adventurousness in creating and running such a ministry “in the world” or “on the street” – out where people are, some Christian and most not.
Speaking the Gospel in a New Context
The above is a bare sketch. We need to go deeper, and hopefully we will do so in the future. Right now, however, let’s turn our attention from an analysis of our context to how we respond to the changes around us. I believe we have more resources than we generally recognize. For the rest of this sermon let me talk about the resource that is the Bible, once we learn to read and speak it in ways that respect and engage the reality of our new context.
As careful Biblical scholarship is saying, for the past two to three hundred years, most Christians in this country were taught to read the Bible for its “spiritual” message to our personal needs and condition. We looked for verses of scripture that made us feel better in the struggle of life and as we faced death. This kind of reading has dominated “Christianity” from the 17th century to the present. Fortunately a half century or so ago, a number of Christian leaders around the world from Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Nazi Germany to Gordon Cosby in Washington, DC sensed that something really profound was going on that was deeper than could be addressed by this way of reading the Bible.
These leaders saw that, on the one hand, conservative evangelicals were “hijacking” the Biblical language for articulating Christian faith and faithfulness. On the other hand, they saw that liberal denominations and churches were capitulating by surrendering Biblical language to the conservative evangelicals and replacing Biblical language with secular alternatives such as secular psychology and philosophy. Leaders like Bonhoeffer and Gordon Cosby refused to capitulate and dared to reclaim Biblical language in ways that speak to our core identities and our responsibilities in the world as servants of God and followers of Jesus Christ.
I shall always remember Gordon’s reclaiming of “born again” at Bill Branner’s funeral as he traced Bill’s journey into deeper and deeper clarity and commitment. At the time I wanted to “honk” for the whole world to hear. Gordon refused to let us trash and turn our backs on the powerful witness of the Bible.
One of neglected doors into the Bible, that is at last being opened, is to appreciate the continuity between Jesus and Paul and to recognize how Paul moved beyond Jesus in the flesh to explicating how the event of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection applies to the whole world and all of human history. Paul dared to interpret and bear witness to the Kingdom of God as relevant to the Gentiles as to the Jews. With the Spirit of the risen Christ guiding him he articulated a faith that consolidated the wisdom and power of the special history of Israel, the words and deeds of Jesus and the history that was unfolding as he wrote.
Here again I have barely scratched the surface. Much work is needed to distinguish authentic, Biblically grounded faith and discipleship from conservative evangelicalism gone to seed on one side and romantic liberalism gone to seed on the other side. Our task is “to walk the narrow ridge” between the two, to use a metaphor of Martin Buber.
Today’s scriptures as clue to understanding the New Testament
Law
In order to hear scripture speak to our times we need to practice reading it as dialectic between law and gospel. Law, of course, refers to what God expects of us as God loving and God-fearing people. Gospel refers to what God has given and gives as sheer grace through Jesus Christ.
Our text from Mark 12 depicts Jesus in dialogue with an individual among the elite who dared to think and speak for himself rather than toe the party line of their group of Jesus critics. The scene is as follows. Some members of the party of the Sadducees who believed there is no resurrection, in contrast to both Jesus and the Pharisees, approach Jesus to ask a trick question about what happens to previously married persons who remarry after the death of a spouse in the resurrection. They are waiting to catch Jesus in a dumb statement to be able to discredit him. Their goal is “gotch-ya”.
One scribe listens to Jesus very intently and likes the way he listens and speaks. He then asks Jesus his understanding of the essence of the law. Jesus responds by quoting verses from Deuteronomy and Leviticus – the greatest is to love God with one’s whole self and the other is to love one’s neighbor the same as one’s self. Jesus ask the scribe for his take, and the scribe conveys the same understanding and adds that these two laws of loving God and neighbor are greater than all acts of ritual. Jesus responds, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God.”
If someone were to ask me how 8th Day stakes up by these criteria of God’s law, my take is that we are not far from that scribe. We have a shared understanding of law that goes far deeper that ritual. We have some grasp of complicity with oppressive system and structure as they rob our neighbors of their freedom and humanity.
Paul calls what Jesus and the scribe say as the law of love. This is the filter through which scripture is to be read. Paul says in Romans 3:31 that it is this law that the gospel reinforces and upholds. In our language this means social justice for the poor, the rejected and the oppressed as well as individual integrity.
Gospel
In Romans 1:16-17 the apostle Paul says to a network of small house churches in Rome in the mid first century C.E. when the church stood in opposition to much that Rome stood for, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also the Greek, for therein is revealed the righteousness of God from faithfulness unto faith.”
This text challenged me recently when I attended a Washington Nationals baseball game. As I walked from the subway exit to the main gate of the ballpark, every 20-30 feet there was a fundamentalist evangelist bellowing out over a loud speaker what he considered the gospel – namely, the warning that unless we who were headed for the baseball game repented of our sins and accepted Jesus as savior we were going to hell - which could be very soon.
I confess that as I walked the gauntlet of 8-10 evangelists shouting through their microphones from subway to the main gate, I felt ashamed, not of what I believe is the Christian gospel but the version being shouted at me from those ear-splitting microphones.
At the same time I feel equally let down and alienated from the Thomas Jefferson version of totally human-centered, rationalistic spirituality that claims that the only viable part of Christian faith is the teaching of Jesus about good morals and rejects the elements of mystery such as the miracles from healing to the resurrection along with the writings of the apostle Paul.
Fundamentalism has been allowed to hijack Biblical language such that it no longer speaks to our common life today. Moreover, fundamentalists do not appreciate that Paul, in communicating the gospel to his time, drew upon language that spoke emotionally to that context. Both Jews and Gentiles would understand his use of language from the realm of sacrifice in worship, the Jews from the sacred ritual that occurred in the temple and the Gentiles from sacrifice in the mystery religions.
An example that speaks to our day in a way that the language of sacrifice does not is the word solidarity. As Christians in the 21st century we are challenged to listen for metaphors that speak as positively and clearly as the metaphors or redemption from slavery and atonement for sin did in first century culture.
There is another issue that would make a substantial difference – namely, to get the balance between gospel and law right. In the 1940 and 50s we heard the New Testament speak of the radical distinction between law and gospel such that obedience to law blocked one from hearing the gospel. One reason is that years ago we were taught to read scripture by single verses and the only translation available to us was the King James Version with its beautiful but opaque Elizabethan language. To repeat, we have to learn to draw from emotionally charged words in our own culture.
The next time I preach (which will be September 14) I want to spend my time on what I understand to be the content of the Gospel, the message that is as relevant today as in the first century. In doing so I aim to contribute to the conversation among us as to what in our Church of the Saviour history is essential . A place to start is one line from the original CofS membership commitment:
I commit myself, regardless of the expenditures of time, energy, and money to becoming an informed, mature Christian.
One difficulty with that statement, long recognized, is that to some it suggests mature faith requires the equivalent of advanced formal education in a world in which for many that is an unattainable privilege. Without abandoning the intent of that original commitment we need to distinguish law and gospel as understood by Jesus and early church in a time formal education was limited to a few. Jesus spoke primarily to audiences of non-readers and he spoke directly to and not “down to” his mixed audiences. Let’s continue to explore what that means for us today from the perspective both of law and gospel.