Part 3
November 28, 2010
Text: II Corinthians 5:14-21
My vision is 8th Day Church as a place of theological excitement. My vision is 8th Day Church alive with theological excitement. My vision is Fred Taylor alive with theological excitement.
What do I mean by theological excitement? First let me describe what I see as its absence. Here I see no height or depth but middle stuff. What shall we eat? What shall we wear? With whom, of the people we already know, shall we spend our time? What shall we talk about? This time will it be politics or sports or family news or the latest gossip? Middle stuff is predictable.
Middle stuff is the essential ingredient of consumerism. Consumerism makes middle stuff tolerable and in turn feeds on our fixation with more – clothes, food and entertainment, the latest technology to disrupt the monotony of one dimensional existence. The issue is not middle stuff per se but its one dimensionality – and what it excludes.
You and I have souls, and we have social consciences which comprise a significant piece of who we are, if in fact, we are not totally defined by getting and spending. Something deep in our being requires us to look around and ask “Why so many street people, beggars, prisoners, poor children, school dropouts and high school graduates who can’t read and write, and pre-emptive war to protect our security?”
Is there anyone in the soul business? Is there anyone in the social conscience business? Is anyone insisting that soul and conscience are inseparable? One dimensionality doesn’t cut it. It lulls us to sleep and to death. Theological excitement stretches us into heights and depths our consumerist culture denies existing.
The church of Jesus Christ is in the soul and the social conscience business. That is why we exist. In this sermon series we are contemplating the strange God of the Bible, the God who disrupts our comfortable one-dimensionality of middle stuff in which our souls and consciences are starving. Christian faith tells us that God disrupts our one dimensional existence in order to save us and the world. Our salvation is grounded in a public event with strange life changing consequences. In II Cor. 5:14-15, the apostle Paul says, “For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.”
Our business as church is fundamentally about unpacking these two verses – one death followed by all dying, followed by all living no longer for themselves but for him who died and was raised for them. You can’t get much more succinct – and mysterious – than that. How then do we unpack the mystery? For the Christian this is the way out of the human bondage to one dimensional existence.
Our task is to unpacking this mystery of transformation of individuals and the world. To help us, I suggest that we start with a strange word for building our theological vocabulary - the word generative. I used this word extensively in writing my book, Roll Away the Stone, Saving America’s Children, especially in the ninth chapter which many of you have read. The rubric I used there was generative thinking. Generative means to generate. It pertains to the production of offspring and to the capacity to bring into existence. When we complain for good reason that the American economy is no longer as productive as it used to be, we are saying it has lost capacity to generate. In recent years it has covered over its loss of productivity by an incredible array of paper transactions. When that bubble burst we went into the most serious depression since the 1930s. This is one way of unpacking the meaning of generative.
The book that introduced me to generative thinking was Paulo Freire’s classic The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire’s passion was teaching illiterate people in the hinterlands of Brazil to read. Millions of poor people were trapped in what Freire called the “culture of silence.” They were caught in a one dimensional existence of survival. Theirs was a closed universe, and lacking the ability to read, they could not expose themselves to alternative universes. During periods of drought, village conversation reflected the fatalism of village consciousness: “It is the will of God. This is the way it has always been and will always be.”
Freire and his teams taught reading by mingling among the people to listen for their generative themes - that is, issues of special significance to village life which, if brought to consciousness, could release energy for action and transformation. In one village, for example, water was a generative theme. In that village there was only one source of water, a single well. Water had to be carried for cooking, washing, watering gardens. The daily transport of water, largely by hand, consumed a major portion of every family’s energy.
To invite discussion, the Freire team drew pictures of the village well and invited discussion. As the discussion went on, the educators would spell out in large letters the key words the villagers were using and point out nouns like water and well in the drawings. They introduced vocabulary after it surfaced in the discussion. In that way it dawned on the people that there was nothing wrong with their ability to think. What they needed were tools to communicate their thinking and to preserve it.
The impact on the villagers was dramatic. Some villagers were learning to read at an elementary school level in six weeks. Freire reports that again and again, after even a few classes, peasants would describe themselves in language filled with excitement. “I now realize I am a man, an educated man.” “We were blind, now our eyes have been opened.” “Before this, words meant nothing to me; now they speak to me and I can make them speak.” “Now we will no longer be a dead weight on the cooperative farm.”
The Church of the Saviour had a similar affect on me when I started attending its School of Christian Living on Friday nights in 1961. In l965 my family and I left a pastorate in the suburbs to belong here. What stands out for me in that experience was Gordon Cosby’s amazing gift of identifying generative Biblical themes and translating them into language that created and shaped this Christian community. Some of you remember the emergence of generative themes which still shape this church today, such as mission, call, and gift. Now 40 years later those generative themes keep appearing in our conversation and help us see our way out of the box of one dimensional living.
The first class I took in the School of Christian Living was a class on money with Gordon Cosby. We used a textbook entitled “The Meaning of Persons” by Paul Tournier, a Swiss Christian psychiatrist. We spent the first eight out of the10 week course talking about what it means to be a person, rather than a personae or mask, in other words, a person free to be one’s authentic self. During those eight weeks I often wondered that while the class was really interesting when were we going to talk about money? We did get to it in the last two sessions but by then we found ourselves thinking about money in a whole different way – in the context of what it means to be a free person. I thought at the time, “Wow, what a different way to talk about money – as an expression of my being.
In our recent class in the Servant Leadership School our Bridge to Hope mission group worked with thinking about vision in three ways, first the vision itself, second obstacles to the vision, and thirdly how we can miniaturize the vision in the world.
I started the sermon by declaring a vision of 8th Day as a place of theological excitement. I then made the connection of theological excitement with generative themes which have the power to bring new life into existence. The next task is to think about obstacles or dangers that block us from embracing our visions.
One that concerns me is separating theological excitement and social justice. They belong together. They are different but they feed each other. Separate and you get something else. Social justice without theological excitement has a way of becoming oppressive. Followers get trapped in a series of “oughts” and “shoulds” without the grounding necessary to stay on course. We can get along with this separation while times are good and the stress is modest. But come hard times when hope is distant, we have nothing to sustain us except our feeble will power.
When Dietrich Bonhoeffer came to study at Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1932, he encountered a great interest among the student body in ethics and comparatively little interest in theology. The conversation was all about championing the cause of the poor and oppressed. Bonhoeffer wrote his bishop back in Germany that when he tried to share a theological insight from the Bible or church fathers, his contribution fell like a lead balloon. For encouragement Bonhoeffer turned to black churches in Harlem where they actively remembered the story of Israel and the story of the Jesus Christ and the church. They belted this story out in fervent singing, passionate preaching, and involvement in the Harlem community.
I come from a conservative Southern Baptist tradition where commitment to the social justice was weak at best and non existent at worst. I find it a huge blessing to be in a church like the Church of the Saviour and 8th Day with our deeply shared vision and values about peace and justice. At the same time my soul hungers for the nurture and encouragement of theological grounding.
Another danger that I see comes with the question: how do we work with inclusion in this age of pluralism? To be welcoming and inclusive seems to be basic to Christian community. The problem arises when we assume it necessary to give up our essential identity as Christians so as not to make people uncomfortable. The problem is that in doing so we give up huge pieces of the transformative story which provide newcomers something to come up against. The banality a fixation with inclusiveness was spoken by a religious talk show host signing off his show with this blessing: “May the God of your choice go with you.”
This is the way consumerism works. Target the consumer. Find what appeals to him, and sell it to him. This has never been the Church of the Saviour way.
Theological excitement requires discernment and sometimes pushing back. My ex wife, Anne Jarman, told me her experience in reading Marcus Borg’s book, On Meeting Jesus for the First Time. She said that she loved Borg’s story of climbing out of his fundamentalist background and his discovery of the historical Jesus. Then she said, “But when he got to the resurrection and turned it into a metaphor, I couldn’t stay with him.” Hearing this, I thought with approval, “Her Southern Baptist genes were kicking in.”
A metaphor is a symbolic truth, not to be taken literally. The problem I have with some of the popular writers is not their historical scholarship which I love, but their tendency to reduce the Christian Gospel to rational principles. The Gospel is not about rational principles. It flows from the generative story of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and the generative themes that flow from that event.
After acknowledging vision and obstacles to vision, our Bridge to Hope mission group spent time in the class working with how we can miniaturize vision in life. Vision requires witness - that is real life, real time demonstration in the world, to stay alive. This is why mission has been so important to the Church of the Saviour. As theologian Emil Brunner once said, “The church lives by mission as a fire lives by burning.” The various missions we have undertaken are all ways of miniaturizing what Jesus called the Kingdom of God and Paul calls the New Creation.
Much of what we have done by way of mission has also been an expression of our social conscience. To keep social conscience from disconnecting from theology, Elizabeth O’Connor gave us the generative theme of inward journey and outward journey in creative tension.
This tension requires that at every step of the way we acknowledge our humanness. Some people have referred to Church of the Saviour people as super Christians, as if we were a different breed. We know that to both untrue and downright hilarious.
For example, in this sermon series I have felt the encouragement of your active listening which I deeply appreciate. I also noticed a difference in the emotional current in the room from the first Sunday to last Sunday. My emotional radar was telling me that after the first sermon there was a kind of lightness in this room and after the sermon last Sunday a kind of heaviness. I asked myself “what is going on?”
You will recall that my text two weeks ago was the parable of the lost sheep. That story is about the joy of finding and the joy of being found. The story has one primary theme – joy, joy, joy. You seemed to get that – that the God we worship is a God of joy, that Jesus our leader, brother and savior operates from joy. Discipleship begins with the joy of being found. Repentance starts with being found.
The next week the text was the parable of the prodigal son which ends with the older brother standing outside his home unable or refusing to join the celebration even though the father came out to urge him to come in. Each time I read this parable that’s where I often get stuck.. I get stuck at the point where I recognize that life isn’t fair. When I am in that state of mind and someone invites me to a party, I tend to shut down. Right then I don’t want to go to any party, certainly not to celebrate somebody else’s happiness when I feel no happiness in myself.
The older brother is modern man and woman - one dimensional man and woman. You and I are the older brother. The heaviness in the room last Sunday was appropriate, especially when I added that the choice for the older brother was to die to his resentment. That is what is required of him to join the celebration of his younger brother’s return.
How does one reckon the invitation to die as good news? From a strictly human perspective, it doesn’t make sense. It has no connection whatsoever to life. The Gospel disagrees.
Let me repeat again our text for today: “For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.”
This first part, about Jesus dying for us, is not hard to identify with. Ask the question, “For whom did Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers and hundreds of unknown people in the civil rights movement die?” Clearly they died for others – for oppressed people - and for their oppressors too.
What is different about the death of Jesus in a world where people dying for other people happens over and over? This is generative in itself, but Jesus’ death goes further. As Paul describes in Romans 5, Jesus in his dying takes on a universal human condition to which the father’s action in the parable of the prodigal son points. The forces represented by the two sons and the villagers line up against radical change, but it is only radical change that will restore the lost son and satisfy the father’s heart.
In the parable, Jesus described the father as taking all out initiative once his son was in sight. He did not negotiate. He did not think in terms of the son going this far and himself going the rest of the way. The father went full out and in the process created a new situation for the son to live as a new human being, a new creation, in community with the father and the neighbors.
This is a deep mystery and I do not want to diminish the mystery by offering a superficial interpretation. But I submit that we have learned some things through our experience as church that draws us into this mystery. It starts with seeing Jesus’ death and resurrection as two parts of one event. Our Christian theology reminds us that Jesus’ dying did not stop with him nor did God raising him from the dead. Dying and being resurrected continue in the church. Just read the book of Acts and the rest of the New Testament.
This is offensive. There is nothing offensive in consumerism – except the whole of it. This is to say that consumerism bends over backwards to not offend, to not scare off customers. Modern rational man argues, “The Christian story is sheer myth. Reason doesn’t allow for a God of this magnitude and creativity to exist.”
Paul speaks to God’s continuing creativity in Philippians 2:5: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself, and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.” In II Cor. 5:15, Paul says, “And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.”
These texts suggest something unprecedented being unleashed in the world that transforms the way we see God and ourselves. That unprecedented thing is what the Bible calls saving faith. The question is whose faith - your faith and my faith or the faith of Jesus?
Like most translators of the Bible, I was raised to think that the faith Paul speaks about is human faith – our faith in Jesus. In the second chapter of Galatians Paul distinguishes between the way things get turned right as generated by human works or generated by faith. With this distinction we are back to the tension between social ethics and theological imagination. The New Revised Standard Version and most other translations translate Paul as saying “we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.” (Gal. 2:16) A growing group of scholars have persuaded me that while the Greek grammar of the text can be read either way, the theological context presses us to read this as referring to the faith of Jesus: “we know that a person is justified not by works of the law but by the faith of Jesus.”
I don’t have time to discuss this in more detail but I want to acknowledge that as I have begun to think of faith in the strange God of the Bible as Jesus’ faith, a huge weight has been lifted off my brain and my soul. It is liberating and generative for me to think of the faith Paul is talking about is as the faith of Jesus himself. Theology and social ethics start to come together for me.
This is because at bottom, faith involves self emptying. And like the older brother I do not do self emptying either well or by human choice. However, when I lose myself and get caught up in theological excitement as has happened so many times in this church, something else starts taking over. Self emptying is not so strange. It is part of joy. I didn’t know what I was getting into when I became the one and only staff member of FLOC with a mandate to close Junior Village with the help of 30 or so volunteers. What I do know is that the offer to succeed Yolande Ford as the one person FLOC staff made my heart beat faster. I couldn’t turn it down. It took me 60 seconds to make up my mind. Why? Because that opportunity was what my heart was yearning for. During the course of my 37 years on the front lines with Jesus in the city of Washington, DC, I was very clear that it was not my faith that was saving me or the organization or the children, families and city we were serving. It was the faith of Jesus that again and again invaded us, and when we saw no way ahead would invade us again, at one time through this person or group and at another time through someone else or some event beyond our control. It was not some process of human self realization. It was the invasion of Jesus’ faith into our midst. I dare say that many of you identify readily with what I am saying.
In closing I want to thank our preaching schedulers, John, Gail and Ann, for the opportunity of three straight Sundays to work with the text in II Cor. 3:4 “Such is our confidence through Christ toward God.” I hope some of this will percolate. I am in process of writing a book with a preliminary title of “The Blessing and Challenge of Being Raised a Southern Baptist.” What started me on the Christian path was a strong sense that something got hold of me as a Southern Baptist youth which even when I have tried to jettison it kept challenging me. I am also aware that from time to time I have confronted dead ends in my early tradition and have found the theology and ethics of the wider Christian Church immensely important. I have appreciated the opportunity to work with some of my issues in preparing these sermons. I would greatly appreciate your prayers as I plug away at this calling of writing a book. It is my hope to say something useful to this church and the church at large.