Author: Vincent

Shall We Suffer?

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached on November 27, 2022
Scriptures: Genesis 32:22-32, 1 Thess. 5:12-24

Hedonism has a pretty bad reputation.  Just hearing the word brings certain debaucherous ideas to mind.  Hedonism is eating the most expensive, decadent chocolate cake you can find.  It’s wild partying with every illicit substance imaginable.  It’s unbridled sensuality.  Hedonism is wild living without any thought of future consequence.  And that’s more or less what the word actually means anymore.  Someone that calls you a hedonist isn’t trying to give you a compliment.  But what did it mean?  Because it used to mean something more.  It used to be a legitimate school of philosophy, and its teachings are more compelling than you’d probably think.

Let’s look at what may be the most famous hedonist philosopher: an ancient Greek man by the name of Epicurus.  Judging from our modern associations, you’d think Epicurus was some kind of wild party boy.  His life must have had a lot of sex, drugs, and the ancient equivalent of rock-and-roll.  Not so, actually.  Epicurus was a really decent guy.  His life wasn’t customized by wild excess.  It was simple.  He loved good friends, rural living, basic cooking, and that was about it.  He was a simple man with a simple philosophy: life is hard because we’re all too busy being afraid of losing what we have.  The solution?  Enjoy the little things.  Spend your time doing what actually matters and avoid wild excess, because if you get used to fancy things, you’ll spend your whole life being afraid that you’ll lose them.  Avoid the fear of loss, seek the simple pleasures, and you’ll be happy.

You’ll notice that there’s not a lot of room for God in that equation.  If simple pleasures are the route to happiness, who needs God?  To be fair to Epicurus, he actually does include God in his writings.  He doesn’t say a lot about him, but he includes him.  You can see right here in your bulletin a quote I pulled from Epicirus’s writings:

 “First believe that God is a living being immortal and happy, according to the notion of a god indicated by the common sense of humankind; and so of him anything that is at agrees not with about him whatever may uphold both his happiness and his immortality.”

Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus

What two words does he use to describe God?  Immortal and happy.  God is happy!  Don’t worry about him!  He’s up there, doing his thing.  At the end of the day, he’s a happy guy that wants you to be happy too.

Can you imagine if Epicirus was around today?  Think about a message like that: God wants YOU to be happy.  I think he’d sell quite a few books.  Maybe get an appearance on Oprah.  He’d be a big deal!  

But we have to ask ourselves, why didn’t his philosophy endure through the ages?  If the message resonates today, but most of us have never heard of this guy and his school of philosophy, what banished him to obscurity?  Well, Christianity.  Some of the people that denounced Epicirus’s teachings were Christian.  Augustine thrashed it in his writings.  Justin Martyr and Tatian did the same long before him.  Christians generally saw Epicureans as the worst available school of philosophy.  And why?

Because the happiness that Epicurus was selling wasn’t true happiness.

True happiness isn’t about managing to lower your expectations to the point that they’re no longer relevant.  It’s not about maximizing your pleasure.  It’s not about avoiding fear.  It’s not about the pursuit of dopamine.

Happiness, true happiness,the kind that lasts longer than an afternoon, isn’t about pleasure.  It’s about fulfillment.  Being what we’re supposed to be!  Doing what we’re supposed to do!  And that’s why life isn’t just one long pleasure trip.  There are other emotions besides pleasure-based happiness.  There’s sadness, fear, obsession and grief.  There’s panic, courage, annoyance and joy.  There are a million different emotions under the sun!  And all of them are on the table while we’re pursuing fulfillment.  And all of them are good.  All of them are important.  

Last week, we spoke of how our engagements with history have grown far too cynical.  The inclination to view the world through the lens of power has made the whole of history little more than wolves and sheep, tyrants and the oppressed.  That’s too shallow.  Christianity says that there’s more to the world around us than the selfish pursuit of power.  There’s love.  We Chirstians know that the world is driven by more than selfishness.  God himself is love, and he’s in this world at work.

If last week was about saying that the readings of the world around us have grown too shallow, this week is affirming that our readings of ourselves have suffered the same fate.  We have also become far too shallow in our own eyes.  Mind you, the readings of history focused on what was ugly, whereas the readings of our lives tend to focus on what’s good.  We focus on pleasure.  We’d like more money.  We’d like more stuff.  We’d like fewer jerks in the spaces around us and more friends.  When God gives us anything other than pleasure, it tends to be frustrating.  Why God?  What did I do to you?  We define success within our lives by the acquisition of pleasure.  We long for more dopamine.  Most of us have become functional hedonists.  But that does a great disservice to what life really is.  When we go through hard things, that’s when we tend to grow the most.  God isn’t trying to make us happy.  God is trying to make us holy.

Our first Scripture reading today, Genesis 32:22-32, is a famous one that points to this exactly: Jacob wrestling with God.  And what a weird story it is!  This is the Old Testament at its finest!  Let’s look at this a little:

That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two female servants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions.

First off, why is any of this happening?  Jacob is going to see his brother Essau.  When he was a kid, he stole Essau’s blessing and ran away.  All these years later, things aren’t going so well.  He has to go back to Esau for help, and he has no idea how Esau is going to respond.  Is he going to welcome him?  Begrudgingly allow him to stay?  Chase him off?  Kill him?  Here, he’s crossing a river.  This is the point of no return.  If Esau decides to attack Jacob and his people, they can’t just retreat if there’s a river at his back.  But God told Jacob to go to Esau.  So this is where he has to make that choice.  Does he really trust God?  This is the last stop.  There’s no turning back after the River Jabbok.  And he crosses it.

So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak.

Notice that Jacob doesn’t start to wrestle with God.  He’s not out there picking a fight.  The Bible says that God picked a fight with Jacob.  What did God want from him?  Everything.  Jacob is a character that’s constantly scheming.  He’s manipulative.  He’s clever.  He usually plans on figuring things out for himself, rather than waiting around for God.  And how has that gone for him historically?  Not great.  He’s won a few, but he’s lost more.  This is a man that has to go back to the brother he cheated to beg for help, for crying out loud, he’s not in a good place.  His self-reliance has gotten him nowhere.  And now?  Now comes God.  And God wants the last shred of faithfulness that Jacob has been holding back on.

A really common reading of this passage is to say that this figure is a pre-incarnation of Jesus.  Some people say that anytime we see God in a human form, that’s Jesus.  I’m not a hundred percent on that one, but I think it’s really interesting at minimum.  How often have we wrestled with Jesus?  How often have we held out because we feel we can figure things out on our own?  Until Jesus hunts us down and wrestles that last bit of pride out of us.

When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. 

Things look pretty evenly matched there for a while.  Both men are struggling.  Jacob is doing well.  The mystery man is doing well (remember, we don’t know it’s God just yet).  Nobody can quite get the edge over the other.  And then?  Out of nowhere, boom!  God touches Jacob’s hip and changes everything.  The fight isn’t as even as it looked.  God was always in control.  With one little touch, he could have won at any point.  A good reminder that no matter how things look, God is in control.  It might look like he’s evenly matched, but it’s all just a show.  God wins.  God always wins.

Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”

At this point, it’s over.  Jacob can’t win with his wounded leg.  The man basically says, “Hey, move on.  It’s over.”  But Jacob doesn’t move on.  He may be defeated, but he’s not letting go.

But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

The clever Jacob.  The man who always relied on his abilities.  His cleverness.  Has been humbled.  He’s held on for what?  God’s blessing.  He’s now someone that seeks only to be blessed by God.  This is a turning point for him.  He’s no longer good ‘ol crafty Jacob.  He’s someone new.

The man asked him, “What is your name?”

“Jacob,” he answered.

Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel,[a] because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”

Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.”

But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there.

So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”

The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob’s hip was touched near the tendon.

Some people like to say this whole fight was metaphorical; just something representative of the inner drama that’s going on in Jacob’s mind during this challenging period.  I don’t think it is.  Because during the fight, God messes up Jacob’s leg.  And at the end of the fight, Jacob walks with a limp from then on.  It’s almost like a movie: there’s a really weird sequence where something absurd happens and after it ends, the main character looks back on it and thinks, “I must have been dreaming.  There’s no WAY that actually happened!”  But then they realize that they have a bruise or a scratch of something in their pocket from the time in question and they realize that maybe… maybe it wasn’t a dream.  Maybe something bizarre just happened.

Jacob wrestles God.  And he’s never the same after that.  Physically.  Mentally.  Spiritually.  It was a painful experience.  He bears the scars from that battle for the rest of his life.  But somehow, a Jacob that has experienced frustration, fear, desperation, and injury is better than the Jacob that we knew.  Through suffering, Jacob grows.  And hasn’t that happened to you?

Our second Scripture, 1 Thess. 5:12-24, is a little more direct.  Paul writes:

Now we ask you, brothers and sisters, to acknowledge those who work hard among you, who care for you in the Lord and who admonish you. Hold them in the highest regard in love because of their work. Live in peace with each other. 

Here, he’s talking about Church leadership.  Not just pastors, but others in your community that are leaders.  Leadership team members.  Choir directors.  Food pantry operators.  All kinds of leadership within the church.  And how does he describe them?  People that work hard.  People that care for others when times are hard.  People that scold others when the behavior within the community becomes inappropriate.  None of that is fun.  Who wants to work hard, deal with weird situations, and scold people that are out of line?  Nobody.  That’s the worst!  But Paul says, those people that are putting up with all that nonsense?  Give them extra respect.  They’re going through all that for you.  The true leader is a servant that suffers on the behalf of others.  THAT’S what makes them worthy of note.  Not because they have a fancy title or a nice degree or whatever other nonsense we come up with.

And now, Paul turns to everyone else and says:

And we urge you, brothers and sisters, warn those who are idle and disruptive, encourage the disheartened, help the weak, be patient with everyone. Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always strive to do what is good for each other and for everyone else.

In other words, be like your leadership is supposed to be!  Work hard.  Don’t turn a blind eye when someone is being disruptive.  Take care of people that need help.  The work that leadership does isn’t just for leaders.  They may be the one that takes on a greater share institutionally, but that’s EVERYONE’S responsibility.  Everyone has a responsibility to do the tough stuff!  And he ends with the worst part: Don’t pay back evil for evil.  When someone does wrong, it’s natural to want to get them back.  It’s not just natural, it’s fair!  It’s reasonable!  But we’re not supposed to do that.  Be better than fair.  Be merciful.  Take the high road.

Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

GIVE THANKS IN ALL CIRCUMSTANCES.  It’s easy to give thanks on Thanksgiving.  Most of us have a nice meal in front of us.  A bunch of family around us.  Who couldn’t be thankful on a day like that?  But when our thanks is just driven by that, it’s just pleasure-based happiness.  It’s easy.  Anyone can get that.  It’s meaningless.  It’s here today and gone tomorrow.  We don’t just give thanks on turkey day.  We give thanks on EVERY day.  The good ones.  The bad ones.  The boring ones!  And we pray.  We pray continually in our hearts.  That’s a verse that’s so deep that I can’t even scratch the surface of it today, so I’ll just leave it at that and come back at some point in the future.  And we rejoice.  

It doesn’t say that you have to rejoice and give thanks for the bad things that happen.  That would be absurd, wouldn’t it?  “God, thank you for this broken leg.”  A broken leg is a bad thing.  We don’t have to thank God for the bad things.  But even in those moments defined by bad things, God is at work, making us better.  Making us shine brighter.  God’s will for us in Christ is to accept these moments, all the while praising God with joy and thanksgiving.  What a gift.  Now we move on to a passage with a theme very similar to last week:

Do not quench the Spirit. Do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all; hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil.

Again, not every religious idea is a good one.  Don’t hear something from your leadership and just assume it’s good because they’re good.  Don’t endure a tough situation and internalize some weird meaning because it feels like God wants that.  Just as with last week, we test the spirits.  We have to check to see that what we get actually lines up with what God has told us in Scripture.  Because we can develop wrong, even when we’re doing everything right.  We have to be discerning on this journey of growth.

May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.

There’s our goal.  That’s true happiness right there.  Sanctification.  That’s God making us holy.  That’s fulfillment.  All of the pain we endure.  The hard work we get through  The insults we bear.  It’s God at work, sanctifying us.  God doesn’t want to make us happy.  He wants so much more than that.  He wants to make us holy.  That’s why any turn to epicureanism, popular though it may be, is ultimately a lost cause.  We’re more than dopamine centers.  We’re beings capable of a full range of emotions, even negative ones.  And enduring suffering isn’t pointless.  Epicurus was wrong.  The wholeness of our lives can’t be found in avoiding pain and collecting pleasures, because God has a way of helping us grow through suffering.  Who knew that a God who died on a cross might end up expecting his followers to suffer now and again?  So what will we do?  Will we rely on ourselves?  Will we back away from the Jabboks of our lives, avoiding any painful wrestling in the process?  Or will we cling and beg for a blessing?

The History of Power

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached on November 20, 2022
Scriptures: 1 Samuel 26:1-12, 1 John 4

I want to read to you the dust jacket of a book I read long ago. The name of the book is King David: A Biography.  It’s written by Stephen McKenzey, a professor of Old Testament over at Rhodes College.

“Through a close and critical reading of biblical texts, ancient history, and recent archeological discoveries, Steven L. McKenzie concludes that David was indeed a real person. This David was not the humble shepherd who slew Goliath and became king, however, but was a usurper, adulterer, and murderer–a Middle Eastern despot of a familiar type. McKenzie shows that the story of humble beginnings is utterly misleading: “shepherd” is a metaphor for “king,” and David came from a wealthy, upper-class background. Similarly, McKenzie reveals how David’s ascent to power, traditionally attributed to popularity and divine blessing, in fact resulted from a campaign of terror and assassination. While instituting a full-blown Middle Eastern monarchy, David was an aggressive leader, a devious politician, and a ruthless war chief. Throughout his scandalous reign, important figures who stood in his way died at convenient times, under questionable circumstances. Even his own sons were not spared. David’s story, writes McKenzie, ‘reads like a modern soap opera, with plenty of sex, violence, and struggles for power.'”

That is a very different story than what is contained in Scripture!  In the Bible, we see King David as someone who is kind, gentle, and devout.  That doesn’t mean he always gets it right. There are some pretty bad stories in there about him too, but the overall vision of David is very different, especially in his ascent to power.  We see a young kind musician that is able to drive away the anger of someone as brutal as King Saul.  McKenzey imagines the opposite.  David is someone who is not at all kind.  He’s horrible!  He’s cruel, he’s vicious, he’s conniving.

How does McKenzey find a David that is the opposite of what the Bible says?  Well, a lot of this particular project comes from taking modern historical trends towards ancient documents and applying them to the Bible.  His first question: cui bono?  Who benefits from what happened in the story of David’s ascent to power?  Well, David did.  His second question: what biases might the author have?  The Biblical account was written by the royal scribes of Israel who worked for David.  The third question he asks is, “Where are they a little too insistent that something is true?”  Because if they had to keep telling people repeatedly that something was the case, maybe it wasn’t.  Maybe it was a lie, and they had to sell that lie with propaganda.  And that’s how McKenzey sees large portions of the Biblical narrative: royal propaganda to make the population think that David’s rise to power wasn’t as violent and brutal as it really was.

For example, in Samuel 24, King Saul is worried that David is more popular than he is and he could usurp the throne if he really wanted to, so Saul tries to kill him and David goes into hiding.  He’s hiding in a cave at one point, and Saul and his men are just outside, searching for him.  And the text says that Saul, “had to cover his feet,” which is a euphemism.  In our time, it might say something like, “Saul had to relieve himself.”  So Saul goes into the cave to relieve himself, and David is hiding right near him in this very vulnerable state, but David is not the kind of person that would murder the king that God put over Israel, so instead, he cuts off a piece of his robe.  When Saul gets back to his army, David comes out and shows him the fragment, essentially saying, “I could have killed you, but I didn’t.  I am not your enemy.”  So Saul gives up and goes home.  But then, Saul gets jealous again almost immediately.  He tries to kill David again, and again David has to go into hiding, and we end up with another story about how David could have killed Saul if he wanted to, but didn’t.  In Samuel 26, Saul and his men set up camp right by David’s new hiding spot.  So David sneaks into Saul’s camp in the dead of night, and, lo and behold, there’s Saul sleeping, his spear right next to his head.  One of David’s men whispers that David could kill him if he wanted to, but again, David is not that kind of man.  He will not kill God’s anointed.  So again, he doesn’t kill Saul.  Two instances where David has a very clear opportunity to take out his enemy; two times where he decided that he wouldn’t do that.  Mackenzie would look at that with suspicion.  Isn’t it convenient that David repeatedly had the opportunity to kill the man that he took the throne from but was just too good to do it?  Don’t trust the propaganda of Israel.  Look for the real story by sifting through their lies.

There’s nothing particularly unique about what McKenzie has done here, and I don’t say that to be dismissive.  By no means.  I only mean to suggest that this sort of reading technique is exceptionally common among modern historians.  It’s not surprising that he applied it to the Bible.  He wasn’t the first, and he won’t be the last.  It’s not any new methodology that makes me hesitate.  It’s the cynicism of that modern methodology.  How cynical is it to imagine that people are so incapable of good that the whole of a story is really just about power?  It’s not about God!  It’s not about being devout!  It’s not about being kind!  That is all nonsense.  No one is really like that.  No, people want to gain power.  That’s what David was really like.  

The last sentence on the dust jacket is particularly telling: “David’s story reads like a modern soap opera with plenty of sex violence and struggles for power.”  I just met with someone last week that was complaining about how hard it is to find a good show on tv today.  Every time a new show comes out, it’s darker and grittier than the last one.  More sex!  More violence!  The popular stories in our world, the stories that we see on tv and read in cheap paperback novels, are the ones we find to be the most comprehensible.  We can imagine people doing things to gain power, sex, and money.  Of course!  That’s what people do.  Stories about people doing things for God?  That’s a little hokey, don’t you think?  It’s unbelievable.  That cynicism bleeds into the stories from the past.  If stories aren’t about power, it’s because someone must have lied to cover up the real story.

This way of reading history isn’t uncommon. It’s not just for authors.  I’m sure you’ve run across it in random places.  I certainly have.  I remember being at a pub once with a friend of a friend.  He asked me if I was Christian.  I said yes.  He then asked whether or not I was Anglican.  I told him no.  He responded, “Good.  That one is so fake it’s ridiculous.  Everyone knows the Anglican Church was made when King Henry VIII wanted a divorce and the Pope wouldn’t give it to him, so he created his own religion to make it ok and now millions of people today believe in it.  Why?  Because they don’t know history.  If they knew their history, they would know how fake all of it is.”  To give some credit to the gentleman, King Henry VIII was the one who started the Anglican church and his interest in getting a divorce was the deciding factor in many ways, but at the same time, the actual historical narrative is a little more complicated than that. When we reduce such a massive story to something so small, we miss a lot of it. 

It was common practice for the Pope to grant divorces to rulers who were looking for an heir and had a spouse that wasn’t able to provide one. Kings need an heir, and if they don’t have one, things get messy.  Mind you, the king was expected to ask the Pope with all due respect to show that he respected the faith and wasn’t being frivolous, but a divorce under those circumstances was considered a reasonable ask.  When King Henry VIII wanted a divorce, his wife was Catherine of Aragon.  She was older than him and had already shown that she had some significant issues when it came to bearing children, so the divorce didn’t seem all that wild… but the Pope said no.  A lot of the Pope’s good friends and supporters were her relatives.  If the divorce was approved, they would feel that she had been humiliated.  He would lose a lot of support.  Naturally, he chose to make sure that his allies were happy at the cost of Henry VIII and did not approve the divorce.  So  beyond lust, you already have some more motivations.  You have a king who wants to hand over his kingdom peacefully.  You have a church leader that needs to win points with powerful friends.  You have relatives protecting someone they love.  Now consider church tradition.  For all we know, the Pope really was sincere.  Maybe he was genuinely concerned about the institution of marriage and wasn’t willing to approve of sin just because the world found it convenient.  I mean, I can relate to that.  I’m not going to approve of any of your divorces, even if you do woo me a bit first!  So now we have tradition and faith added to the mix.  But beyond that, we have to remember that Protestants didn’t just pop into existence in England because the King was interested in talking to them.  They were already there!  They were already evangelizing!  It was hard to be a Protestant in England.  You risked martyrdom daily, but a lot of people risked a lot to tell the English that their church was leading them away from what God wanted and the Bible could steer them right again.  There were people who had lived and died hoping to see England embrace Protestantism like this.  When someone suggests that one man wanted a divorce so he made up a religion, it implies the whole thing was about lust and power, but really, it was about so much more.  There was fear of a succession war!  There were the obligations of leadership!  There was the love of family!  There was the weight of the Scriptures and hundreds of years of church tradition!  There was the rugged witness of the martyrs!  There was a lot that went into the creation of the Anglican Church.  It wasn’t  just a story about sex and power.

And we could get even closer to everyday life.  How many people say that churches are a scam?  I can remember a friend saying, “You know it’s a scam because they ask you for money every time you show up.  If it was really true, they wouldn’t want any money for it.”  Not an unpopular opinion, but a lazy one.  Most churches have pretty open finances.  If you want to learn more about them, you can ask and someone would be delighted to talk about where the money is spent, but that takes effort.  It’s much easier to just say it’s all about power and people are lying to get your money.

When people look at the world today, there’s this clear, repeated tendency to be cynical about motivations.  History looks like this long series of stories about people trying to get a leg up on one another.  This particular way of reading the world and its history really has its root at the beginning of the 19th century.  Last week, we talked a little about the shift from the pre-modern world to the modern.  How we went from seeing the author as the one with authority, to seeing the work as having its own authority, to seeing ourselves as the only authority.  That shift changed the way people told history, because there were no distinct inarguable causes that people needed to rally around sincerely.  There wasn’t even an objective framework to say what was good anymore.  If someone did something for love or beauty or God, that was just their opinion.  Their take.  Their way of obscuring their real motivation: they were promoting their personal thoughts and trying to twist the world to benefit themselves and those like them.

Things get a lot more cynical right around here.  There’s a quote from one of the most famous tellers of history in the modern era, Karl Marx, that comes to mind.  And if you’re wondering why your pastor is sneaking communism into the sermon this morning, stick with me.  Marx is such a good example of a cynical historian.  Right from the beginning of his most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, he attempts to explain the history of everything, and he starts like this:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.  Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In other words, he’s claiming to summarize every history book ever written right here.  There are people in power and they want to stay in power, and there are people who aren’t and they need help.  His big pitch is that we need to overthrow the people at the top so we can create a new society without these wealthy oppressors.  He may not have pulled off his utopia, but that big idea was very influential: history is about power.  There are wolves, and there are sheep.  There are oppressors, and there are oppressed. There are people who will hurt others to get what they want, and people who are too weak and disenfranchised to seek power.  It’s all very disenchanted; hopeless even.  

As we’ve been exploring the postmodern world, we’ve noted not only the challenges that we have in expressing Christianity to the world around us, but the advantages that we have.  Even if they don’t always understand us, we possess things that the world craves.  Last week, it was the simple fact that we know that there’s a point to all this.  There’s a real, actual point to life!  So many people in this world don’t know why they bother to wake up every morning.  They get up and ask, “What am I doing?”  They have to invent reasons to exist because they have no objective framework!  Nothing to wake up for!  We know that there’s a point.  There is something bigger than ourselves worth existing for: there’s God.  This week, it’s clear that we can offer a better reading of history.  The world is not just mired in selfishness and greed.  There’s more in this world than that.  People do things for so many reasons: hope, fear, courage, strength, weakness, and love.  There is so much more to the human heart and all of history than just a cynical drive to accumulate for ourselves.

This passage we’re looking at, 1 John 4, is one of the most famous passages of Scripture of all time.  It’s known for its beauty and quoted time and time again, but you’ll notice I grabbed a little more than normal.  People often start quoting from verse seven forward, when the language about love kicks in, but there’s an advantage to going back to the beginning of the chapter.  If you don’t have the context, it’s easy for a modern person to interpret this passage in a way that ironically doubles back on self-centeredness.  You’ll see what I mean.  Let’s begin at verse one.  

Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.

That’s odd, right?  This is right before the “God is Love” bit that we all know and love!  You go up just a few lines and BOOM!  We’re talking about the Antichrist.  Nice, normal people may not talk about the Antichrist, but the Bible sure does, so we’ve got to look at it.  What is he really trying to get at here?  John is trying to address the fact that not all ideas religious ideas that people have are good ones.  Sometimes, people have bad ideas.  Sometimes, what people say is bogus.  Just because someone says, “Well I prayed and I really feel that God is saying XYZ,” does not mean that God has suddenly decided XYZ.   Sure, sometimes people get things from God, but sometimes people get them from other places, so John tells us to test the spirits.  See if this is legit before you buy in.

The test he proposes is asking people about Jesus.  People that are going to go off script and do something weird in their faith often have a warped understanding of Jesus.  They invent their own Jesus because the real one is too challenging for them to deal with.  To domesticate Jesus and his Gospel, they craft an idol in Jesus’s image.  You’ll see that he specifically warns about people in their region that are saying, “I believe Jesus is God, but I don’t believe he was really a man.”  Orthodox Christianity has always held that Jesus is fully God and fully man, but in the first three centuries, the “fully man” thing was really hard for people to accept.  Some people claimed that even though Jesus may have looked human, he must have really been a spirit.  If you touched him, your hand would have gone right through him.  Even his death on the cross was just an act!  He pretended to be crucified to teach us how to be a kind person, but he wasn’t actually crucified, because gods don’t become people and gods don’t die.  That school of thought was called docetism, and docetism was one of the first heresies.  

And what is a heresy?  Heresy comes from the Greek word haresis, which means to choose.  When the Church deemed something a heresy, they were saying that the people involved in those thoughts had not actually received the faith that was passed down by the apostles from Jesus himself.  Instead, they chose to pick out the bits that they liked and invent new ideas to cover up the things they didn’t like.  Heretics choose their faith, rather than inheriting it.  The docetists chose their own vision of Jesus, rather than accepting the real one.  That’s why John encourages us to test out ideas by asking people about Jesus.   If their vision of Jesus does not line up with what Scripture shows us, be wary.  Be very wary.

Today, I doubt we’d find many people that would claim that Jesus was pure spirit. That’s  just not a trendy idea anymore.  If anything, you’d be likely to find the opposite!  There are plenty of people that believe that Jesus was a good man, but not God.  Isn’t that interesting?  As much as things have changed, people still find it hard to believe that Jesus was fully God and fully man.  Here, John is warning us about people who have created an idol in the image of Jesus, but don’t have any interest in the real thing, and he says this only verses before his famous speech about love.  

He goes on:

You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood.

Now, we start that classic build to the most famous line:

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.  This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.  This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.  Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.  No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

The center of everything Is love.  Love is the beating heartbeat that keeps everything flowing. Love is what keeps everything from collapsing in on itself!  Love stands at the center of time.  It is the most dominant force.  Is there still selfishness and oppression?  Sure, but there’s a force better than that, bigger than that, and more powerful than that.  It’s not just this sort of background entity that has no real power.  It’s not just a matter of taste and aesthetics that justifies the people who are seeking to oppress.  No, it is a real, legitimate force at work in the world.

This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.

People become truly capable of loving when they have a relationship with God.  That’s a bold claim, right?  We’ve all known Christians that sure don’t love very well, and we’ve all known non-Christians that seem to love a whole lot better.  How could he say something like that?  It seems absurd!  Where’s the logic to it?  He boils it down to three words:

God is love.

This is the section I warned is easy to misread.  It says, “God is love,” but it’s easy for people to reverse it in their head.  They think, “love is God.”  That would mean that whatever we think about God ought to be subjugated to our understanding of love, and we tend to think we have love figured out pretty well (at least, on a conceptual level).  We love watermelon!  We love our spouses!  We love running.  We love all sorts of things that make up our daily life.  If love is God, we don’t have to worry, because as long as we’re enjoying something, we’re being driven by love, and love is God, and we don’t have to change anything about our lives or anybody else’s.  But it doesn’t say love is God; it says God is love.  We should be subjugating our knowledge of love to what the Bible reveals about God.  What we know of love is so small so incomplete we’re just barely scratching the surface.   As we start to explore this thing called love, we become aware of a greater mystery; something that invites us forward beyond our shallow understanding and that is God. That is God.  

All of that can be a little confusing.  One theologian that said it very well is a man named Dionysius the Areopagite.  I can tell you guys want to say that one too!  That’s all right!  Try it with me: Dionysius the Areopagite!  Once more!  Dionysius the Areopagite!  There we go!  Don’t let anyone say we don’t have fun in church.  Dionysius the Areopagite was someone that wrote about this passage.  He taught that there are two ways to know God: we know God by what he is but also by what he is not.  There’s positive knowledge, and there’s negative knowledge.  Positive knowledge is used by comparing God to things that we know.  He uses this exact example!  God is love.  What does that mean?  This thing we know as love?  That is something like what God is.  But he also encourages us to be aware of the opposite which is equally true: God is not love.  By no means is he saying that Scripture is wrong.  He has tremendous respect for Scripture, but he says the point of making a statement like that is remembering that what we know as love is so rarely the fullness of what love really is.  Our love is often tainted by self-interest, lust, and ignorance.  It’s not really the kind of love that God has for us.  If we say, “God is love” and compare our paltry understanding of love to the fullness of the transcendent God, that’s not enough.  No, God is love, but that’s just the beginning.  God is also not the kind of love that we know because he is more than that.  The love that is God is infinitely more pure than we can imagine.  It is infinitely better.

John is writing in that same spirit.  He was saying that true love begins with God because nothing else is capable of bringing out pure love.  It’s not a matter of effort.  If you try your hardest, you might be able to capture something that is somewhat like love, but it won’t be pure love.  It’s also not a matter of knowledge.  Even someone who has studied the theory of love for years won’t be able to love perfectly.  Effort and knowledge might get you close sometimes, but it’s not either of them that truly allow us to love.  The fullness of love is something that can only be known through a relationship with God.  God is the only source of that pure, perfect love in creation, and it’s not effort or knowledge that can really bring us to that kind of love.  It’s faith in God.  Through faith, we can become instruments of the Holy Spirit, channeling that perfect love into this world. That’s what he’s saying.

He continues:

Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus.  There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.  We love because he first loved us.  Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.  And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.

Modern readings of history are stuck.  They are mired in cynicism.  Since we assume genuine goodness can only come from acting as our authentic self, it is so easy to read any attempt at communal action as a power-grab by the few to oppress the many.  King David becomes a tyrant.  Anglicanism looks like nothing more than an excuse for a divorce.  Churches start to be seen as schools for aspiring con artists.  If all action involving others is an exercise in oppression, the only thing we can hope for is an ideal future date where we can all be free from each other.

Christianity tells a different story.  It’s not about getting away from one another; it’s about coming closer together.  It’s not about subduing the world with our own affections; it’s about allowing our affections to be subdued by something far greater and purer than us.  It’s not about trying hard enough to love or learning something about love; it’s about living in God and allowing that love to show through.  The world is not mired in hopelessness.  There are more powerful things than self-interest afoot.  There is love.  God is love.  Amen. 

Questioning Authority

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached on November 13, 2022
Scriptures: Psalm 119:161-168, Judges 17:1-13

Comedy of Errors at an Elegant Downtown Restaurant
The chair is really a table making fun of itself. 
The coat tree has just learned to tip waiters.
A shoe is served a plate of black caviar.
“My dear and most esteemed sir,” says a potted palm to a mirror, “it is absolutely useless to excite yourself.”

I remember my English teacher reading this poem by Charles Simic to the class back when I was a junior in highschool.  When he was done, he asked us what it meant.  One student said that maybe Simic was trying to talk about how objects take on their own personalities over time.  Not a bad guess, but the teacher just nodded his head and kept waiting for more answers, so we kept going.  Another raised their hand and suggested that the author was talking about how we treat objects better than we treat people.  Again, solid guess.  But still, the teacher just kept waiting with that stoic look on his face.  A few other people took a stab, but nothing seemed to satisfy him.  Finally, an uncomfortable silence settled over the room.  He said, “I noticed all of you were trying to tell me what the author meant.  What if he didn’t have anything in mind when he wrote this?  What if this is just a random thing he wrote down?  What if YOU’RE the one who has to decide for yourself what it means?”

He was introducing us to that classic dilemma within literature: where does the authority to declare the meaning of a piece lie?  Is it with the author, is it in the work, or is it with the audience?  If the author is the person who has the right to tell us what their piece really means, the best way to learn more about it is to read a biography about them.  The more we can learn about them, the more we can figure out what it was they were trying to get at.  But if you think the work itself has authority, you may not want to waste your time with a biography.  The author might have created something that they didn’t even fully understand!  Spending more time with the work itself will reveal things that they might not have dreamed of.  Pablo Picasso was famously in favor of this way of looking at things.  He would paint something and then critics would say, “Ah were you trying to get at this?” and he’d respond, “You know, when I painted it I didn’t think I was, but now that you pointed out it’s very clearly there.  You’re right.”   And then, of course, the meaning might rest with the audience.  Who cares what the creator wanted to say?  What do you experience when you’re engaging with the work?  How does it make you feel?  How does it help you to see things in a new way?  That’s what it’s all about.

Where does meaning lie?  Where is the authority: the author, the work, or the audience?  This question broadly correlates to three different eras that we’ve been talking about (premodern, modern, and post-modern).  In real life, we have those same three possible sources of authority available to us today.  We’ve got an author (God), we’ve got a work (creation), and we’ve got an audience (ourselves).  Where does authority lie?  Each era answered the question differently.

In the pre-modern world, especially from the Middle Ages until around 1700, it was broadly assumed not only that there was definitely an author of all of creation, but that author had the authority over everything.  If you look at the way their society was structured, it was deeply, deeply religious.  Political theory was steeped in faith.  The economy was highly religious.  Even their everyday language was constantly pointing to God.  Something as tiny as a basic greeting had a religious dimension to it.  Instead of “hello,” you might get something like, “God be with ye,” or “God save you.”  And why?  Because they assumed if you really want to understand things, you look to God.  God knows the meaning of everything.  Look to Him and you’ll know what’s going on.  You can see that attitude reflected so clearly in their writings.  I’m going to stick with poetry to explore the thought processes in each era because, you know, pick a motif and go with it.  John Dunn’s poem, Death, Be Not Proud, is a great example of thought in the Middle Ages:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me…

It goes on from there in that same general spirit.  What’s he drawing trying to draw attention to?  God.  We see this thing called death, and it might look scary, but it isn’t as bad as we think.  If you have faith in the author of creation, in God, you have to recognize that death isn’t anything to fear.  Look up to God and you’ll know how everything works out in the end. God makes sense of the world, even in the face of death.

Now let’s move forward to the Modern Era.  In the 17th through the 20th centuries, people started to think differently.  They said, if there is an author out there (and who can say whether there is or not), he doesn’t seem to do much.  Let’s not worry about authors.  Let’s worry about the work: creation.  Clearly creation has certain laws, regardless of where they come from.  If we understand those laws, we will understand existence.  So people set about uncovering those natural processes that governed creation.  

Some people think of this as a great scientific revolution.  A time of light, as opposed to the darkness that came before it.  I mean, the movement was called, “the Enlightenment,” so that’s certainly what they were trying to invoke, but I would push back on that.  Yes, there were some great advances in technology during this timeframe, that much is undeniable, but was it really as totally unprecedented as some make it out to be?  I don’t think so.  Science was advanced in startling ways in a lot of timeframes.  If it weren’t for the accomplishments of Medieval scientists that came before them, people like Alcuin of York, Roger Bacon, William of Ockham, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and others, much less the thinkers of antiquity and before them.  No, the heart of the movement wasn’t nearly as scientific as it sometimes presented itself to be.  No, the biggest difference was that philosophical change in perspective: the world is its own authority.  We just have to understand it’s laws if we want to live well. To see that in action in a very unscientific way, let’s take a look at Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

What’s Whitman excited about?  Nature!  This air!  This soil!  This blood!  Natural things are good.  There’s an earthiness that makes all of creation worth paying attention to.  It has value in and of itself.  Don’t look up!  Look out.  Look to creation.  It will tell you all of the meaning that needs to be known.

And then, of course, we have the Postmodern Era which we have discussed at length throughout this series.  That’s where you end up with poetry about shoes getting fed caviar.  What’s the point?  It’s up to you.  What does the work bring up in you?  What journey do you undertake internally when you encounter creation?  That’s what matters.

As you go through each era, you can see how people think about meaning and order.  The pre-modern mind saw a sacred order.  God at the top, everything goes around him.  The modern mind saw a natural order.  Keep the order in mind and you’ll figure things out as you go.  In the postmodern world, you make your own order, because there’s no natural logic to the things out here.  The world is what you make of it.

I know some of you may not be big fans of poetry, so thank you for suffering through those examples with me.  You can see these philosophical elements in any artistic medium, though.  I just chose poetry because I liked it and it’s short enough to get to quickly, but you can choose anything you like.  Think about literature.  Dante’s Divine Comedy is a perfect example of a pre-modern story.  A man goes through Hell, Purgatory, and then Heaven, detailing things along the way.  We’re literally observing the divine order at work.  You move into the Modern Era and you have Walden.  It’s just a guy living in the natural world.  The whole point is showing the beauty of living well within that natural order.  And then take something from today, for example, A Song of Ice and Fire a.k.a. Game of Thrones.  It may not be exactly a literary classic but it’s a story that got a lot of people’s attention.  Who’s the good guy in Game of Thrones?  No one.  There’s no divine order.  There’s barely any order at all.  Everyone is trying to seize power for themselves because where does power lie here? You.  You decide what the world is and you try to make what you can of it. 

You start in the medieval section and you will see art everywhere depicting divine beauty: Jesus, saints, and angels.  Then you move forward a little and what do you see?  Landscapes.  People want to capture the beauty of the natural world.  And the further on you move, the more you see the landscapes start to vary.  Artists like Monet and Van Gogh start to paint landscapes from perspectives that earlier artists would never have imagined.  And then, of course, you get to contemporary art and things just fall apart.  I saw one exhibit that was just a fence leaning against the wall.  If they didn’t have a plaque with the artist’s name next to it, I’d have assumed they were just doing construction!  I even googled it and found that exact fence on sale at Home Depot for $219.  You too can have an art installation in your home for the low, low cost of $219.

As we move through these different philosophies in each era, from seeing the authority in an author, to seeing authority in the work, to seeing it in ourselves, you would think it would be like a process of taking off shackles.  Theoretically, we should be the freest people of all time.  We should feel lighter than air!  We should be freer than ever since we’re only answerable to ourselves!  But if that’s the case, why is our Postmodern Era so typified by existential dread?  Why do so many people wake up in the morning and ask themselves, “What’s the point?  What am I even doing here?  What’s the point of any of this?”  It turns out, when we’re the only ones with authority and we invent our own meaning, it’s really easy to remember that it’s all nonsense.  We made it all up!  It’s pointless.  If we get frustrated or bored by what’s going on, the sheer arbitrariness of it all is right there, staring us in the face.  Is it any wonder that people can’t be bothered to enjoy a meaning that they know they’ve made up?  Why bother reading a book or a speech or short story when all of it is nothing more than an opportunity for me to expound upon myself.  Things feel pointless because in many ways, they are.  When the world is bound by the smallness of our own horizon, it seems so tiny.  We have nothing to live for!  We have nothing to die for!  It’s all tremendously shallow.  

This is not the first time that these sorts of ideas have taken hold.  There’s this temptation to assume that whenever something happens, it’s happening for the first time ever.  That’s rarely the case.  Here, we can see in the Scriptures a period not so very different from the one we inhabit; a period where people see no legitimate authority outside of themselves.  Let’s read through Judges chapter 17 carefully.

Now a man named Micah from the hill country of Ephraim said to his mother, “The eleven hundred shekels of silver that were taken from you and about which I heard you utter a curse—I have that silver with me; I took it.”

Then his mother said, “The Lord bless you, my son!”

Right from the beginning, this story should strike you as odd.  What a strange opening!  A man steals his mother’s fortune.  It’s 1,100 shekels of silver.  We don’t need to do any kind of ancient conversion rate to figure out that this is a lot.  Near the end of this story, someone is promised ten silver shekels of silver annually for a job and he takes it without complaint.  If ten shekels a year is a decent wage for one year, this is massive!  He’s set for life!  But he stole it from his mother, who curses whoever took the silver, so he brings it back.  And what’s her reaction?  To bless him.

Why?  Returning the money you stole because you’re worried about a curse is better than keeping it, of course, but it’s not exactly an example of sterling behavior.  Maybe it’s worth lifting the theoretical curse over, sure, but giving a blessing?  Why?  He hasn’t done anything good!  He barely managed to avoid the obvious evil that he was headed towards!  He hasn’t earned anything!  Even though he’s a sketchy guy, he gets a blessing.  I’m sure only good will come of this.

When he returned the eleven hundred shekels of silver to his mother, she said, “I solemnly consecrate my silver to the Lord for my son to make an image overlaid with silver. I will give it back to you.”

So after he returned the silver to his mother, she took two hundred shekels of silver and gave them to a silversmith, who used them to make the idol. And it was put in Micah’s house.

There has been some debate among commentators about what exactly was intended by the word “idol” in this particular story.  Is this idol intended to represent a being other than God, or is this idol a visual representation of the god of Israel?  I tend to assume the latter.  She essentially says, “Thank the Lord! I’ll have this idol made,” so to me that tips the scales towards an idol designed in service of God, rather than Baal or someone like that.  But here’s the thing, it doesn’t actually matter in the end. Either you’re making an idol for some other God, in which case you are guilty of breaking God’s law because you made you’re worshiping some other God, which is wrong, or you’re breaking the law by making an idol, which is against God’s law regardless of the intent you had when you made it.  

God explicitly forbids idols multiple times throughout the Scriptures.  It’s in the Ten Commandments!  Don’t make idols!  Why?  Because even if the idol is intended to serve God, idolatry fundamentally reverses the divine order.  God created us.  We are in his image.  When we turn around and create idols, in some sense we’re turning around and creating God.  We’re designing him in our image.  God is not subject to the smallness of our understanding.

The pattern of disordered behavior continues.  At first, a blessing went to a thief.  Now an idol goes to God because someone wants to thank him.

Now this man Micah had a shrine, and he made an ephod and some household gods and installed one of his sons as his priest. 

Even if I was right earlier and that first idol was intended to serve God, Micah has decided that one god wasn’t enough.  He’s filling out a little pantheon for himself, giving his main god some little friends.  Then he designs his own priestly garb and finds a priest to hire.  He’s got his own little religion going on!  And then we see the through line for the whole book of Judges:

In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit.

This line appears throughout Judges, and it’s one of the last lines of the entire book: in those days, Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit.  It’s not necessarily a reference to a physical King.  Not long after Judges ends, Israel does get someone to be king and God warns them that they don’t need a king over Israel.  He warns them that he should be their king and that any king other than him is going to make all kinds of mistakes.  But they tell God, “That’s a little abstract for us.  We’re not really into the whole ‘king we can’t see’ thing. We’d rather just get a physical king just like every other nation.  Thanks!”  So they get a king, and he’s pretty rotten.  The point here is not just that there’s no physical king; it’s that there’s no authority.  There’s no god that anyone really acknowledges.  They are their own authority.  They do what they want.

A young Levite from Bethlehem in Judah, who had been living within the clan of Judah, left that town in search of some other place to stay. On his way he came to Micah’s house in the hill country of Ephraim.

We’re introduced to this Levite, a priestly figure, out traveling around.  He’s looking for somewhere to stay.  We don’t know why, but we know he has responsibilities back home.  For whatever reason, he’s out and about and he meets Micah…

Micah asked him, “Where are you from?”

“I’m a Levite from Bethlehem in Judah,” he said, “and I’m looking for a place to stay.”

Then Micah said to him, “Live with me and be my father and priest, and I’ll give you ten shekels of silver a year, your clothes and your food.” So the Levite agreed to live with him, and the young man became like one of his sons to him.

Micah hires this Levite away from his responsibilities in Bethlehem. And notice that at the end, it says that this Levite became like a son to him. In Roman Catholic churches today, people refer to priests as “Father,” partially to show reverence to a religious authority, but here this Levite is just the opposite! He’s “like a son.”  This priest isn’t someone he’s going to submit to.  He’s hired a false authority for show, but he retains authority over this Levite. 

Then Micah installed the Levite, and the young man became his priest and lived in his house. And Micah said, “Now I know that the Lord will be good to me, since this Levite has become my priest.”

What an absurd statement we get to end this story.  This man has done nothing but break the God’s law since the story began.  He stole money from his own mother, he made an idol, he invented new gods, he started his own religion, and then he hired a corrupt priest to serve as the head of this new religion.  And he sits back and thinks, “Yeah, God must be pretty happy right now.”  Why?  He’s never done anything that God wanted.  He’s only done what he wanted.  He imagined what he thought a good divine order might look like, he usurped traditional elements and ritual to make it look like it had some dignity to it, and now he’s bought in to what he himself invented.  He’s not interested in worshiping God!  He’s only interested in legitimizing his own self-worship.

All too often, that is the way Christians approach church today.  Is there an interest in God?  In church?  In his divine order?  No.  But there is an interest in legitimizing self-worship with traditional elements and ritual.  We come to church with our lives just the way we like them and tell God, “I’m happy with the way I’ve arranged things.  I just need you to sign off on it.  Please tell me it’s ok to break your law.  You want me to be happy, right?  So approve of what I’ve done!  Tell me you’re happy.  Tell me you’re happy!  Tell me you’re happy!”

The whole thing reminds me of a theory by the famous mystic Evelyn Underhill.  She once explained the goal of life by telling people to map their lives out on paper.  Write the central element of your life in the middle, and then everything that serves that center all around the page.  For most people, their name goes in the middle of the page, and most events in their lives are intended to serve them.  God ends up in a corner of the page, propping up their ego.  In this model, the assumption people carry is that God exists to serve them.  People assume that if everything serves them, they will be happy.  Ironically, it makes them miserable.  We long for something greater than ourselves to serve.  As long as we’re using all of the elements in our lives to serve ourselves, we’re eternally frustrated by just how shallow everything seems.  If we want to make a better map, we start with God in the center and design everything in our lives around him. How are we serving him?  How is our life a part of something greater than ourselves?  Serving God brings joy!

I think she’s right. I think she’s absolutely right.  In a world where there’s a sense that we ourselves are the ultimate authority and there’s no meaning outside of ourselves, we Christians have the meaning of life at our fingertips!  But there’s a temptation to slink back and say, “Maybe they’re right.  Maybe I am the authority.  Maybe all of these religious trappings are intended to serve me.  God is here to endorse my order.  He’ll like what I do.  He’ll sign off on it.”

But if we do that, we are denying the world something it desperately needs.  People are waking up every morning asking, “What’s the point?”  People desperately crave to know that there’s a point to all of existence.  For crying out loud, they’re reading poetry about feeding caviar to shoes and they’re staring at gates!  We can do better than that!  People are seeking legitimate beauty!  Legitimate truth!  Legitimate authority!

We have to accept God’s authority to understand any of that.  We have to seek to serve Him, rather than ourselves.  There is an authority outside ourselves.  There is an author, and he carries incredible authority over creation, revealed to us most completely in his word.  The great missionary, Leslie Newbiggin once said, “If we cannot speak with confidence about biblical authority, what ground have we for challenging the reigning plausibility structure.” In other words, we can’t present a genuine Gospel to the world if we can’t trust that God’s authority, as put forth in his word, is actually legitimate.  No, we need to look to Scripture and see how the God that we claim to serve is communicating with us!  Talking to us!  Telling us what the point is!

Of course, sometimes, it’s hard.  Sometimes, the things God asks of us in Scripture are incredibly difficult.  Some of his ways don’t seem to serve our wants at all.  The world might look on and say, “What are you doing?  Why don’t you just live an easy life?”  Nobody remembers people who live easy lives.  Nobody writes stories about people that did nice, easy, normal things.  Nobody writes a book about someone who went and got coffee one day.  People read stories about heroes that slay dragons and save kingdoms.  People crave stories about people who overcome the odds for something greater than themselves.  That’s something we have the opportunity to do: to serve something greater than ourselves. 

For the past three sessions (not counting our Reformation Day detour), we’ve talked about Postmodernism.  We’ve talked about the ways that the church is, in many aspects, on the back foot.  We’ve talked about truth; in the postmodern world claiming to know objective truth is seen as arrogant.  How do we communicate in a way that seems humble without giving up on truth?  We’ve talked about sin; in a world where the assumption is society is the sole corrupting force, how do we acknowledge the sin that rests in the human heart?  Both truth and sin are complicated to discuss honestly with people outside the Church.  It violates popular thought in ways that are often seen as offensive.  But when it comes to authority, I think we may have something intriguing on our hands.  It’s something that doesn’t violate the orthodoxy of secularism in a way that’s obviously offensive, but is still outside of the norm enough to make people hesitate and ask, “What?”

If we started to live into God’s authority, REALLY started to live into it, we would probably be perceived as pretty weird people.  We’d be those Christians; the ones who take it a little too seriously.  Too often, we try to distance themselves from those Christians.  We try to seem religious, but not too religious.  We try to be approachable and cool.  That’s proven pretty ineffective.  Looking at attendance rates in larger denominations, the more a church ignores the uncomfortable bits in Scripture to seem cool, the more their attendance rates plummet.  The more a church presents a Biblical counterculture to the world, the more likely they are to grow.  I don’t mean to oversimplify things by suggesting that attendance proves that something is right.  Obviously popularity is a poor substitute for truth.  But I do mean to suggest that people outside the church are seeking more than just an institution willing to rubber stamp the dominant cultural order.  They’re actually more interested in a weird place that they don’t fully understand than they are a safe place where that affirms their own authority.  Weird isn’t all bad.

When you’re weird, you show that you’re willing to break from a status quo that’s proving itself ineffective.  You also become the kind of group that earns a second glance from people.  Have you ever stopped to look twice at something normal?  No!  Of course not!  You see a million normal things every day.  Why on Earth would you stop to look at one more normal thing any longer than you have to?  But something weird?  You may well stop and look for a minute!  This thing, foreign though it may seem, is different.  It’s got something to say.  That’s a huge advantage to the Church, if we’re willing to take it.

Some churches do, and it proves surprisingly effective.  I remember one Pentecostal girl in seminary that spoke very well on this.  When I met her, I asked her about tongues because that’s what you do when you’re talking to someone who’s Pentecostal!  You talk about tongues!  It’s a rule somewhere I think.  We chatted about it a bit before I said, “You know, it must be really hard to evangelize because that’s really out of the norm.  I mean I think it’s weird and I’m a Christian!  I already agree with you on like a huge chunk of things that non-Christian people don’t, and I think your understanding is, forgive my saying it, strange.  It must be infinitely more challenging to talk to non-Christians about your faith, since this is a significant part of it.”

She responded, “Are you kidding me?  It’s so much easier for me to evangelize.  People want to talk to me.  They come up and say, ‘You’re Pentecostal, right?’ and I say, ‘Yeah.’  And they say, ‘But you obviously don’t believe in that tongues stuff, right?’ and I say, ‘I don’t just believe in it; I’ve seen it.  Come and see!’”

I may not agree with the way Pentecostals understand tongues, but wow, that’s a good sell.  I almost went to church with her there and then.  “Come and see!” 

In a world that isn’t used to accepting authority outside of themselves, there’s a shallowness that many feel.  Increasingly, people crave something bigger than their own thoughts and whims, and we have something they’re looking for.  Something weird.  Something that should be forcing us to live in a way that’s totally different from the people around us.  If we’re honestly accepting the authority of God as presented in the Scriptures, people should have to look twice!  If we’re living the way that we’re supposed to, there should be conversations a lot like the ones she experienced.

“You’re a Christian, right?”

“Yeah.”

“But you don’t believe in any of that weird stuff do you?”

“Yeah.”

“Wait, so you actually think there’s a God that you can talk to and outdated laws he wants you to keep and an objective point to all of this?”

“I don’t just believe it; I know it.  Come and see.”

The Authentic Self

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached on November 6, 2022
Scriptures: Psalm 51, Romans 3:9-20

This is sermon three in our series on the Gospel in a postmodern world.  In our first week, we talked a little about the current state of things in the West.  Statistically, Christians are more likely to lose their faith than in any prior generation and conversions are rarer than ever before.  Rather than assume that it’s just a product of every church being incompetent or suggesting that the Gospel needs a hip new revision for a new era, I went in a different direction.  I suggested that the current Western cultural movement, Postmodernism, is one that is especially challenging for Christianity to flourish in.  The doctrinal orthodoxy of pop-culture is not kind to our faith.  We can’t just keep doing the same old same old.  We have to accept that we are missionaries in this new world, and the first step for any missionary is to evaluate the culture.  Know it.  Know the advantages and the disadvantages.  Know the challenges and the easy moves.  Know what people expect.  Then you can go from there.

In week two, we talked about truth.  The postmodern world is typified as a post-truth world.  There is no popular framework for real, objective truth.  There’s only subjective truth.  What’s true for me is not what’s true for you.  Truth is little more than an opinion that’s accepted by all present.  This will not do.  Christianity, from its inception, claimed to be genuinely true, not partially true or a truth in a competing market of reasonable truth claims.   Christians have to be people concerned with OBJECTIVE truth, calling people back to a genuine reality that was created by God.

And then we had a slight departure from the series in Reformation Day.  Which was fun!  I love doing a little history.  We talked about Martin Luther and the origins of Protestantism.  We learned about sola Scriptura and sola fide.  And near the end of the sermon, I mentioned that works righteousness was making a comeback.  People today, if they assume a god exists, don’t see themselves as someone who needs salvation from the God in question.  All in all, they don’t tend to see themselves as something that needs saving.  Which makes sharing the gospel in a traditional way a challenge.  “Hey, did you know God will forgive all your sins in Jesus Christ?”  “What sins?”  “The ones you’ve done your whole life long!”  “That’s pretty presumptuous of you.  I haven’t really done any sins that matter.  Actually, I’m one of the good ones.  Shame on you for being so judgy.”

And some of you may feel as though that’s an untrue statement.  You might think, “Hey, most people would agree to their sinfulness on some level, Vincent.  You’re just being judgy.”  So let me clarify my observation here: how many people that you meet genuinely consider the core of their humanity to be tainted by original sin?  How many people genuinely think that they’re only capable of good by God’s grace, without which they are only able to sin?  Not a lot.  The average assumption about human nature isn’t that it’s hopelessly flawed.  It’s that it’s actually shockingly good.  Let’s think about a pop culture example that states this theory pretty clearly.

How many of you saw The Greatest Showman?  It came out about 5 years ago.  It was actually up for a few awards, if I remember correctly.  It’s this musical about the circus.  In that movie, there’s a group of people that belong to the circus’s freak show.  They’ve had hard lives.  They’ve been made fun of.  They’ve been ostracized.  But now?  Now that they’re in a community together, they’ve gained the confidence to be themselves… and they sing this power ballad: This is Me.

I am not a stranger to the dark
Hide away, they say
‘Cause we don’t want your broken parts
I’ve learned to be ashamed of all my scars
Run away, they say
No one’ll love you as you are
But I won’t let them break me down to dust
I know that there’s a place for us
For we are glorious
When the sharpest words wanna cut me down
I’m gonna send a flood, gonna drown ’em out
I am brave, I am bruised
I am who I’m meant to be, this is me
Look out ’cause here I come
And I’m marching on to the beat I drum
I’m not scared to be seen
I make no apologies, this is me.

What is the assumption about our singers?  That deep down, they’re incredibly beautiful.  They’re different in a way that scares the world, and so the world has tried to keep them down.   So they have to band together and resist the pull of society!  They have to learn to be authentically themselves in a hostile world. 

 The problem isn’t with me!  The problem is OUT THERE in society!

Now, obviously in that example, it’s hard not to agree.  Being mean to a bearded lady because they look different is unambiguously cruel.  But that ballad spoke to people from every walk of life.  It won the Golden Globe award for the Best Original Song, it was nominated for an academy award and a Tony, and it had millions of replays on every music streaming service you can think of.  And why?  Because it’s easy to relate.  It’s easy to feel like someone who is uniquely beautiful that’s being held back by society.  That’s part of the philosophical lens of the postmodern world.  Sin isn’t something in me.  I’m pretty amazing once you get to know me.  SOCIETY is the sinful thing.  If you tell me Im sinful, that’s not gonna resonate.  It’s mean.  I’m pretty good.  If you tell me society is sinful… oh, man.  AGREED.  Society IS dreadful.  We need to get rid of that thing so that I can start being my authentic self!

The orthodox Christian view is very different than the modern Western view.  And just to drive that point home, I want to look at two philosophers.  One a very orthodox Christian theologian.  One a philosopher of the Enlightenment.  Both men wrote a book named Confessions.  Both of those books detail a story in which they  stole produce.  But the takeaway for each man is totally different depending on how they think about sin and what needs redemption.

Our orthodox Christian is Augustine of Hippo.  In his Confessions (written sometime in the fourth century) when he was a teenager, he was hanging out with his friends one night… and they saw this tree of pears on someone else’s property.  And what did they do?  They stole the pears!  They snuck into the yard, filled a basket with the pears, and made off with them.  Why?  Not to eat them.  As a matter of fact, they had better pears at home.  They just threw the basket of pears to some pigs and laughed about the whole thing.  No, they stole them because it wasn’t allowed.  They wanted to break the rules.  They wanted to steal.  They wanted to destroy something beautiful!  He writes:

“It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error–not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction in itself, seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself.” 

-Augustine, Confessions

For Augustine, why did he destroy the pears?  Because something is wrong INSIDE.  There’s something deadly wrong.  That’s why we need salvation… because from our birth, something inside is veering us away from life towards death.  That’s sin.  That’s the problem.  Original sin was something humans were born with.  Because of humanity’s fall when Adam and Eve ate that fruit that God told them not to, humanity’s nature itself was changed.  We went from law-abiding creatures to law-breaking creatures.   So every one of us, regardless of what we’ve done specifically, is tainted by original sin.

Now, let’s move to Rousseau.  Rousseau was a philosopher in the Enlightenment and he ALSO wrote a book called Confessions.  Make no mistake, if you’re a nerd, you don’t accidentally write a book called Confessions without knowing what you’re doing.  He’s deliberately drawing his audience’s attention to Augustine.  And he ALSO includes a story about produce theft with friends!  But notice how he tweaked things.  He’s working for this guy whose mother has a little garden growing nearby.  And this boss asks him to regularly go steal a little bit of asparagus from that garden, sell the asparagus, and give him the proceeds.  He’s really uncomfortable that he would be asked to do this by an authority, but he wants to please the boss, so he does it.  And after a few times, he starts to become bitter.  He asks himself a question: “Why am I taking on all the risk with none of the reward?”  So he starts skimming a little off the top.  But that’s not really enough to make it worth the punishment that he would endure if he were caught stealing, so he starts stealing other little things that he finds around the house.  Apples.  Trinkets.  Anything that he can get his hands on.  He’s been put in an unjust situation!  In his mind, additional theft at least gives him what he’s owed for his boss’s unfair demands.  Notice what slowly twisted him.  Was it his inner desires?  No!  The real culprit was society!  He writes:

A continual repetition of ill treatment rendered me callous; it seemed a kind of composition for my crimes, which authorized me to continue them, and, instead of looking back at the punishment, I looked forward to revenge. Being beat like a slave, I judged I had a right to all the vices of one.

-Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Confessions

Rousseau doesn’t believe in original sin like Augustine does.  He believes in what I’ll call “the beauty of authenticity.”  He thinks people are fundamentally good.  The thing that causes trouble is society.  Society warps people.  It makes them want to be other than what they are.  They start to try to be better than.  Bigger than.  Smarter than.  They want to be the boss!  And for them to be better than, others have to be lesser than.  People, fundamentally good, are warped by the society around them.  People have to learn to let go of society’s corrupting grasp and be the beautiful creatures they always were.

Pears and asparagus.  Both stolen.  Both thefts encouraged by friends.  But the locus of conversion is very different.  Do we need to convert individual people?  Or do we need to convert society?

And some of you, I’m sure, are saying, “Vincent, slow down.  Aren’t they both right?  Isn’t it true that society needs changing and people need changing?”  Sure.  But what we’re trying to identify is the root problem.  If it’s society, I can set out to create bulwarks against unrealistic expectations and oppressive forces to recover the goodness that each person secretly holds in their hearts.  It’s not going to be easy, but it’s doable.  If the problem is that original sin has corrupted human hearts… well that’s a bigger challenge that we can tackle.  That’s when we need to get someone much bigger involved.

The seeds that Rousseau planted during the Enlightenment took root.  And they grew.  And today we see their expression in movies like The Greatest Showman.  People are wired to critique the world around them.  Ask anyone!  Ask, “What cultural forces are preventing you from being yourself?”  You’ll get a laundry list of answers.  Easy.  Ask someone, “What sins are preventing you from being yourself?”  and you’ll get a less warm answer.  Similarly, it’s really hard to talk to someone about a God that forgives their sins when people aren’t really concerned about their own sins.  It’s much easier to talk about a God that wants to change the world around me.  

And I include myself in that.  Remember, as we critique culture, we’re a part of it.  We don’t get to say, “This is what other people do!”  No, this is what WE do too.  It’s really hard to talk about personal sin, it’s easy to talk about societal sin.  That isn’t a natural human instinct to push the blame onto someone else.  It’s a cultural shift.  The early Methodists were required to be in small groups.  You couldn’t be a Methodist without being in a small group.  It didn’t work that way.  And during your small group, you had confession time.  With everyone there.  And you named every sin that you were wrestling with.  And everyone there prayed for God to help you with those sins.  Can you imagine doing that today?  No way!  That sounds insane!  Give me a justice group or something.  Let me go solve the problem OUT THERE!  But the problem in here?  Psht.  Get that outta here.  It’s good enough.

So let’s think about this shift.  Can Christianity let go of its commitment to original sin and shift to focus primarily on societal sin?  No.  No we can’t.  That’s not to say we can’t acknowledge that there’s sin out there.  It’s not to say that we can’t work to try to help those affected by it.  But we can’t say, “people are fundamentally good and we just need to work on some really good laws until we get it just right and THEN everything will be good.”  We can’t.  The problem is deeper than that.  According to the Bible, we could come up with the most perfect society in the world, all the best laws, totally remove all oppressive forces, totally remove all need to feel better than or worse than… and we’d still manage to mess it up.

Turn in your Bible to Romans 3 verse 9:

What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin. As it is written:
“There is no one righteous, not even one;
    there is no one who understands;
    there is no one who seeks God.
All have turned away,
    they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
    not even one.”
“Their throats are open graves;
    their tongues practice deceit.”
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
“Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
ruin and misery mark their ways,
and the way of peace they do not know.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”


Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.

Most of what we have in this section is just Paul quoting other parts of the Bible.  He’s quoting several different psalms and Isaiah.  Why?  To talk about our sin.  And is this because Paul hates people?  Not at all.  He thinks that people have a problem that’s deeper than societal pressures.  He thinks our hearts are fundamentally infected.  And if you have an infection in your heart, do you worry about polishing up your social interactions?  Do you say, “Man, I just try harder and the infection will just go away!”  No.  You don’t solve an infection with willpower. You call a doctor.  Paul is trying to tell us that there’s this infection in our hearts.  And he knows the doctor: Jesus.

What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin

What’s going on here?  Paul is addressing whether or not Jews have an advantage over Gentiles in regard to sin.  After all, they had the law, right?  Surely someone who knows the law will be in less trouble than someone who doesn’t have the law!  They’ve got everything right there!  You might think about this as though it’s about church people today.  Don’t we have an advantage against sinning?  We’ve got the Bible!  We’ve got church tradition!  But what does Paul say?  NO!  You’re not any better off!  You’re a sinner.  You’ve got the same infection that they’ve got.  You need a doctor just as bad.  Sin isn’t just a problem that requires some better laws.  It’s deeper than that.  You need something bigger.  

And now Paul gives us that big list of Scripture quotes:

“There is no one righteous, not even one;
    there is no one who understands;
    there is no one who seeks God.
All have turned away,
    they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
    not even one.”
“Their throats are open graves;
    their tongues practice deceit.”
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
“Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
ruin and misery mark their ways,
and the way of peace they do not know.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

Look at what he’s doing here.  He’s naming all of humanity first off.  Little babies.  Old folks.  Everyone.  Nobody is righteous.  Not one.  All have turned away.  And now he goes all throughout the human body to show just how lost we are.  Our throats.  Our tongues.  Our mouths.  Our feet.  From head to toe: infected by sin.

And every so often, there’s someone who gets tripped up by that word “fear.”  Fear of God means respect in this context.  Don’t get tripped up.  It’s reverence in the face of his awesome majesty.  It’s the sobering recognition that he’s in charge of every aspect of everything ever.  It’s that feeling of proper smallness in the face of infinite bigness.  It’s not fear that he’ll hurt you.  That’s not what Paul is trying to say.  He’s saying, nobody has a right relationship with God.  Not one of us.  

Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.

The problem should be clear at this point.  It’s not JUST what’s outside.  Sure that’s wrong.  But more than that, there’s a problem inside.  Let’s read on to see the solution.

But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

There’s the solution.  Faith in Christ is the only thing that can cure us.  Our works aren’t enough.  Just like with Martin Luther last week, you can try and try and try and no amount of effort will ever be enough to solve the problem.  Every person on earth is redeemed not by works, but by faith. A commentator named Handley Moule writes: “The harlot, the liar, the murderer, are short of it; but so are you. Perhaps they stand at the bottom of a mine, and you on the crest of an Alp; but you are as little able to touch the stars as they.” Everyone falls short, but everyone can be justified freely by His grace. The doctrine of original sin matters because you can’t cure a disease that you don’t know about.  If we say we’re all good inside and it’s just a matter of outer troubles, we’re addressing the wrong problem.

But what do we do if maintaining sinfulness is a part of the core Christian thing?  How do we evangelize to people who don’t see themselves as sinful?  If you don’t need to be saved, how can I introduce a savior? I spoke with a campus minister from the university recently, and he actually brought this up.  He mentioned that evangelizing to people by talking about their sinfulness and need for a savior might have worked 50 or 60 years ago, but today, it’s just a non-starter.  People don’t recognize their personal sin or need for a savior.  But something that has proven to be especially effective is evangelism about relationship.  We live in a timeframe where people are more isolated than ever.  In Robert Putnam’s landmark study, Bowling Alone, one of the metrics he used to check societal isolation was the size of groups that people went bowling in.  Now, people go bowling by themselves more than ever.  Bowling leagues are much smaller than they were in the past.  And that’s just the metric he chose as his central conversation piece for the book.  Social clubs are dying in droves, petitions are less common than ever, people know their neighbors less, people meet their friends more rarely.  Community is at an all time low.  People are lonely.  This campus minister recognized that and used it to evangelize.  He talked to people about how God wants to be in relationship with them, despite all the ways they’ve been pushing him away.  THAT worked.  THAT was effective at opening a conversation about God.

People may not feel guilty, but they feel alone.  They know that something is wrong in this world and they’re desperately trying to fix it.  Do they need to know about sin?  Yes.  Absolutely.  But leading with that isn’t going to make sense.  It’s going to feel like an attack and people will defend against an attack.  Guilt versus innocence may not make sense, but loneliness and closeness do.  It’s not a perfect substitute.  After all, if I’ve hurt God, can’t I do something to make it better?  There’s that gap where it’s not completely addressing the sin problem.  But, you know, it’s not works-centric and it’s still accurate.  Sin is a doctrine that will probably take some time for people to understand in our era.  That’s ok.  Not everything will make sense all at once.  Sometimes, you just need to get a foot in the door and see where things go.  When I was first Christian, I barely had anything that looked like a genuine Christian faith.  The only doctrines I thought seemed good were Heaven and a good God.  The rest just seemed crazy!  But the deeper doctrines need more time to teach.  I was hooked by the lure of eternity and and God pulled me in from there.

As we evangelize today, it’s important to recognize that people won’t see themselves as sinful.  This is a hard doctrine.  And unlike objective truth, a debate won’t gain us any ground.  But we can pivot.  We can acknowledge that we are far from God.  Our relationship is weak.  Only through Christ’s sacrifice can we approach God afresh.  And when people start to encounter God, they’ll recognize that it’s not enough to just say hi.  Something more is necessary.  Something that transforms what they are into what they were always supposed to be.  And it’s a good reminder for us too.  When we don’t feel particularly sinful.  When we’re convinced that we’re just a good person trapped in crummy circumstances that someone else really ought to clean up… well that’s when we need to recognize that our relationship with God is weak.  If we’re blaming the world as though he doesn’t know what’s going on in it, we need to spend some time with him.  Only then will we start to see the transformation that we need.

Amen.

Reformation Day

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached at The Plains United Methodist Church on October 30, 2022
Scriptures: 2 Peter 1:10-21, Romans 1:8-17

Happy Reformation Day, everyone!

I’ve noticed a lot of Methodist churches don’t regularly celebrate Reformation Day, which is a shame.  It’s a great opportunity to look back at our own history; to see where we’re from and what some of our core DNA is.  We need to give it the attention it deserves.  At one of my past appointments, I spoke about Martin Luther during the sermon, and afterwards a woman came up to me and said, “Wow, Martin sounds great!  I haven’t met him yet.  Does he go to the other service?”  Who can’t blame her for what she doesn’t know?  It’s on us pastors for not teaching it enough.

For those curious, Martin Luther did not go to the other service. Martin Luther lived in the 16th century.  He was the founder of Protestantism.  Without him there would be no Methodists!  There would be no Anglicans from which Methodists could come!  Not only would there be no Protestants, but what we know today as the Roman Catholic Church would look different as well.  Martin Luther is a big deal so I think it’s worth a little time to tell his story and remember about one of the great Protestant heroes.  

I want you to imagine that the year is 1521. You are in an imperial court in the city of Worms, a city that’s in what we know today as Germany, but was known back then as a part of the Holy Roman Empire.  This room is full of some of the most powerful people in the world.  Among them is Charles V, the singular man who is the archduke of Austria, the Prince of Spain, the lord of the Netherlands, the duke of Burgundy, and the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.  He is a big deal.  There’s also a papal envoy dressed in some of the finest clothes imaginable.  In front of that envoy, a monk stands next to a pile of books.

The envoy speaks: “Martin Luther, this court has reconvened.  Yesterday we asked you two questions.  The first: ‘Are you the author of these books in front of you?’  You answered yes.  Our second question: “Do you renounce the ideas contained therein and recant your heresy?’  You asked to be granted a 24-hour recess.  This was granted, but we are back today, Mr Luther, and we need an answer.  Do you renounce the ideas contained within these books and recant your heresy?”

You wouldn’t have expected things to turn out like this given where this story starts.  It starts in a little kingdom called Saxony.   Saxony was not the kind of place where life-altering things tended to happen.  It was in Northern Germany.  Northern Germany wasn’t well developed.  It was really rural.  Southern Germany had a lot of stuff.  Northern Italy had a lot of stuff.  Northern Germany?  Not so much.  There were no ruins of an old Empire to build on.  There were no great trade routes.  Most of their top items to sell were natural resources; grain, fish and minerals.  Saxony wasn’t the kind of place where big things happened. 

None of that was helped by the politics of Saxony only a few generations back.  When King William II of Saxony died, his two sons split the kingdom and each inherited half of it.  The elder brother got to choose how the lands were split, and the younger brother got to choose which area he wanted to inherit.  And so the elder split the lands: one of the two parcels was a long, twisty portion of land that was mostly rural, and the other was a little clump of land that had all of the major cities in it.  The choice fell to the younger brother: did he want to rule the urban center of the lands, or the larger rural area?  He took the urban area, leaving the elder brother, a man by the name of Ernest, the jaggedy rural strip.

Since Ernest was the elder and got second pick of the lands, he got something extra: the title “Elector of the Holy Roman Empire.”   I don’t want to get too far into the weeds describing the political system of 16th century Germanic kingdoms, but here’s a really basic understanding: imagine if the United States had a weak federal government and strong state governments.  In this model, the president would still exist, but he would appear on the global stage to represent the collective interest of the states.  Individual states would have a lot of autonomy.  The president wouldn’t really have much say over them.  That’s basically what the Holy Roman Empire was.  There were a bunch of really small kingdoms, some so small that they were just singular cities, all bound together in mutual interest and represented by an emperor that they got to elect.  Not everyone got to vote for the emperor though.  Only a very small group called “the electors” got to vote.  Ernest may have inherited the rural lands, but he was an elector, and that made him, strangely, an important man with a somewhat unimportant kingdom.

That’s the legacy of 16th century Saxony.  Not exactly the center of the world.  But when Ernest passed away, his son, Frederick the Wise, was looking to change all that.  Frederick was bound and determined to make little Saxony the kind of place where things happened.  The capital of Saxony, Wittenberg, only had 2,000 people in it and 400 buildings, but it was the biggest city there was in Saxony, so that’s where he started.  He created two plans to make Wittenberg a destination for people all over the world.

The first was to create the biggest collection of relics the world had ever seen.  Relics were basically Christian artifacts.  The presiding theory of the day was if you looked at a relic God would bless you.  It was a very mechanistic process.  Look at the thing?  Get the blessing.  Frederick started collecting relics and managed to get his hands on over eighteen thousand of them.  He even managed to collect a vial of milk from the Virgin Mary and a twig from the burning bush.  Now, you can decide if you think those relics were legitimate or not, but people at the time thought they were VERY legitimate.  Pilgrims started flocking to Saxony to see all of his relics laid out in Wittenberg’s chapel.  They wanted to soak up all of God’s grace that they could!

Frederick’s other plan was to build a university in Wittenberg.  He’d build a massive, top-notch university and people would come from all over the place to attend!  Maybe, some of them would even stick around and become citizens of Saxony.  So he started hiring professors.  He even bought one of those newfangled printing presses!  Printing presses were a bit of a curiosity at this point.  Books weren’t all that common.  They weren’t even written in language that the average person understood.  They were only in Latin, the language of scholars.  Frederick wasn’t sure how exactly this printing press was going to help him, but new things were exciting and his university would have nothing less but the very latest in technology.

Even with Frederick’s ambitious plans in full swing, the average person would not have expected much from little Saxony.  Nor would people have looked at the hero of the Reformation, Martin Luther, and expected great things from him.  Martin was from a middle-class family.  His dad owned a mining business and managed the business side of things, which was both expensive and risky.  He had to take out loans to buy the mining rights to a piece of land and he never knew when there might be a cave-in or flooded tunnel that would impact his ability to pay off the loan properly.  He spent most of his life in debt as he took out and paid off different loans, but all things considered, he was pretty good at what he did.  The mining business did well enough, so he sent his son, Martin, off to college in a place called Erfurt, a big city in the area, in the hopes that he would become a lawyer.  If he was a lawyer, Martin would be able to help the family business a lot.

That was not to be.  Martin went to college, and one day, while he was coming back to campus from a little trip, there was a storm.  We’re not just talking about a little rain. We’re talking about howling winds crashing thunder!  Lightning struck right next to him!  He was sure he was going to die.  He prayed to God, “Let me live through this and I will do whatever you want. I will give my whole life to you,” and the storm subsided.  So, true to his word, he gave his life to God and became a monk.  His father was not particularly enthusiastic at first, but he warmed up to it over time. He saw his son’s sincerity and wanted what was best for him.  So, Martin started living in his local Augustinian monastery there in Erfurt.  He found a mentor that he really admired.  Things were going well!  Unfortunately, his mentor moved away.  There was this little university that was just getting started up in Saxony’s capital, Wittenberg, and it was hiring up all of the professors that it could.  Since Martin’s mentor was both a monk and a professor, he took a job and transferred over to a monastery in Wittenberg.  Unfortunately, Martin didn’t have a lot of friends around the Erfurt monastery after his mentor left.  The other monks weren’t on the same page as him.  They decided to transfer him to their branch in Wittenberg so that he would be near his old friend and out of their way.  When you’re a monk, you don’t really get a say in the matter.  They’re not asking if you’d like to be transferred; they’re telling you that you’re getting transferred.

You might think that Martin would be overjoyed to be back with his friend.  He was not.  He was really frustrated.  Wittenberg was full of nothing!  All of Saxony was full of nothing!  That was the kind of place where barbarians settled!  Nonetheless, as he settled in, things turned out pretty well for him.  He became a pastor and worked at the local church.  His mentor helped him get on-staff at the university where he taught as the professor of biblical theology.  Everything was slowly turning out ok.

Now we have the right person (Martin) in the right place (Wittenberg) for the Reformation to kick off, but there’s one critical element we haven’t discussed: the powder keg.  The event that blew up and kicked everything off.  At the time, the Catholic Church was selling something called indulgences.   An indulgence was basically a little certificate from the pope that said all of your sins were forgiven.  They were also transferable.  You could buy one and apply the forgiveness to someone else.  A lot of people would buy them for their dead relatives.  The popular assumption of the day was that your dead relatives were probably in purgatory.  Heaven was only for the super holy Christians, Hell was for non-Christians, and purgatory was for Christians that were too sinful to make it into Heaven.  God would purify them over the course of a few thousand years until they had been fully cleansed of their sins.  That process of purification was said to be pretty unpleasant, so you wanted to help your dear sweet relatives get out of there in any way you could.  Buying the pope’s indulgences was the best way to get grandma to Heaven.

I’m sure many of you find that thought process unthinkable, but there’s a long series of ideas that were accepted over time before selling indulgences started to make sense.  I won’t go through all of it, but it starts with ideas like, “Well, if you go to a holy site, isn’t it reasonable to think that God would bless you?”  Sure, ok, that makes sense.  God probably blesses pilgrims that go to holy sites.  “Well, what if Christians do something to help others?  Like defending them from persecutors by going on crusade?  Will God bless them for doing that?”  Ok, sure, intellectual baggage of the crusades aside, maybe it’s reasonable that God would bless people that set out to help others in unfortunate circumstances.  “Well now, what if you donate a large amount of money so that someone else can do those things?  Wouldn’t that also deserve a blessing?  Because you’re the reason someone else can do it.”  Right there, you’ve already got the fundamental framework for indulgences.  You’re just a hop, skip, and a jump away from writing certificates. 

Martin hated the church’s sale of indulgences.  They were getting ready to sell them in Saxony for the third time in five years.  Saxony wasn’t wealthy!  Why did they keep selling them there?  And all the money from the indulgences was going to fund repairs of Saint Peter’s Basilica, a really fancy church in Italy.  Why did the pope need the money of peasants to fund a church for the wealthy?  And Martin saw the negative effects that indulgence sals had on people, both rich and poor.  Poor people that had to scrimp and save so they could buy a certificate for grandma to go to Heaven.  The rich, on the other hand, didn’t worry as much about living a Christian life when indulgences were around.  They could do whatever they wanted as long as they made sure to grab a certificate for themselves when they were done.  The whole thing had gotten completely out of hand.

As this was happening, Martin had a rapid spurt of spiritual growth.  He was someone who seemed to have it all: he was a professor, he was a monk, and he knew his Bible forward and back!  But he had a dark secret: he hated God.  Martin hated God because he thought that he would never be good enough for him.  The popular theory to explain how law and grace functioned in the Christian’s life was via something called “imbued grace.”  They thought that God gave you enough of his grace to go out and keep the law pretty well.  If you made mistakes, well, then God would be angry.  If you asked for forgiveness, he might punish you a little less severely, but you would still be punished to some degree.  And after it was done, you were expected to go and live a perfect life again.  Martin believed it, just like everyone else, and so he tried very hard to live a life without sin.  He realized that when he really thought about what he had done on a given day, there was always sin to be uncovered.  There was always a moment when he was jealous or when he was short with someone, and so God was always angry and waiting for him to do better.  His best wasn’t good enough.

But everything changed when he was teaching a class on Romans.  Romans is like that.  Some of the most famous Christians of all time converted while reading Romans. Saint Augustine, one of the most famous Christians of the 4th Century, converted while reading Romans.  Martin Luther converted while reading Romans.  John Wesley converted while reading Romans.  The book of Romans is powerful.   Let’s look at one of the passages that was on the top of his mind.  This is Romans 1:8-17:

First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you,because your faith is being reported all over the world.

This is a letter from Paul to Roman Christians and you can see that he’s impressed with them.  He’s impressed that they have such incredible faith in a place like Rome.  Christians in Rome endured a lot of persecution.  Torture and even death, depending on who was in charge at the time.  It would have been incredibly dangerous.  You would need an impenetrable faith!  But this is the kind of church where people had impenetrable faith.  They didn’t stumble; they endured.

God, whom I serve in my spirit in preaching the gospel of his Son, is my witness how constantly I remember you in my prayers at all times; and I pray that now at last by God’s will the way may be opened for me to come to you.

In other words, he wants to visit them.

I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong— that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith. 

I love the humility here.  One of the great apostles says, “I want to give you a gift and the gift… is that you and I get to sit down and build each other up.” Faith is not just a one-way street!  It’s something that takes people coming together.  People that are mature and very wise and people that are brand new!  We all stand to learn and be built up by one another.

I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that I planned many times to come to you (but have been prevented from doing so until now) in order that I might have a harvest among you, just as I have had among the other Gentiles. I am obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish. That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel, 

The gospel would have seemed pretty ridiculous by a lot of the popular philosophies of the day.  The average Roman would think that the gospel was nonsense! “Your God’s so great? Well, why’d he get crucified then?  A powerful god doesn’t end up dying on a cross.  I can find a god more worthy of my worship than that.”  The average Jewish person would have been equally disinterested: “Your god is supposedly great, but he hasn’t delivered us from the Romans.  I don’t see any grand miracles that he’s done.  He rose from the dead and apparently did nothing worthy of note for me.”

But Paul is not ashamed of the gospel, regardless of what others think! He goes on to say why:

because it is the power of God 

How often do you think about the gospel in that way?  How often do you understand it not just as a collection of words, but as something powerful?  As words that crackle with energy?   The gospel is the power of God!  It’s not just something for us to mull over in our spare time.  It’s the kind of force that changes hearts and minds.

For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

This whole time, Martin had been trying to be good enough.  And here we see one of the major themes that comes up again and again throughout Romans: you’ll never be good enough to earn salvation.  On our own, we are not capable of perfectly keeping God’s law.  God grants us salvation not because of our works, but through faith in Christ.  When we reach out and trust in him, that makes all the difference.  Our salvation isn’t through legalism.  It’s through love! God looks down and sees not a guilty person, but someone who has been cleansed!  Who is innocent!  Who is pure!  Someone covered by the perfection of Christ.

We are saved by faith, not works.  Does that mean we should go on sinning?  By no means!  Paul specifically says that later in this same letter to the Romans.  But if our salvation isn’t based on legalism, we should be able to act however we want, right?  No!  Paul says that a true Christian should be transformed through their encounter with God.  We shouldn’t want to sin anymore.  We should be totally different creatures, empowered by God to seek what is right instead of what is wrong. And besides that, our motivations for doing what’s right should change.  We don’t keep the law out of fear of God’s punishment.  We do it out of fear of hurting our relationship with him.  We want to make him happy.  We should naturally want to honor and cherish the one we love.  Our relationship with God may not be based on maintaining a code of conduct, but we should still want to honor the God who saved us with everything we do.

And here, inspired by the words of Scripture, we see Martin articulate one of his big ideas: sola fide.  We are saved by faith in Christ alone, not by our works.  Not our abilities.  Not because we’re good enough, but because we have faith in Jesus.  We reach out to him and accept the sacrifice he made on our behalf.  Martin’s big idea didn’t come from the intellectual trends of the day, but through scripture alone.  There’s another one of his big ideas: sola Scriptura.  That’s Latin for “by Scripture alone.”  Scripture is the only authority that we can rely on to ensure that we’re practicing real Christianity and not just something that we made up.

Now we’ve got the who, the where, and the what.  Everything is in place.  Martin Luther started preaching what he had learned in Romans.  And the indulgence sellers came into Saxony and started preaching their doctrines.  This is a selection from the sermon of a man named Johann Tetzel.  He was selling indulgences in Wittenberg, and this is what he preached:

You should know that all who confess and in penance put alms into the coffer according to the council of the confessor, will obtain complete remission of all of their sins…  Why are you standing there?  Run for the salvation of your souls!…  Don’t you hear the voices of your wailing dead parents and others who say, “Have mercy on me, have mercy on me, because we are in severe punishment and pain.  From this you could redeem us with small alms and yet you do not want to do so.”  Open your ears as the father says to the Son and the mother to the daughter, “We created you, fed you, cared for you, and left you our temporal goods.  Why then are you so cruel and harsh that you do not want to save us, though it only takes a little?”  (20-21, A Sermon, Johann Tetzel, as found in The Protestant Reformation, Hillerbrand)

THAT was the last straw.  THAT was what made Martin Luther write his ninety-five theses.  Ninety-five reasons why indulgences were bad! Ninety-five reasons that the pope was wrong! Ninety-five ways the church was failing!  And he didn’t just keep this debate in academic halls. He started writing books.  These were books written in a language that regular people could actually read.  He wrote for the average person because he thought they deserved to know what was going on.  He also made sure that people had access to the Bible in their own language so they didn’t have to take his word for it.  They could go to the Word of God and look for themselves!  He looked to Scripture alone (sola Scriptura) to find the truth, and now everyone else could do the same.  Because even if he was eloquent, his words weren’t worth anything.  God’s word was worth something.  It was and still is the final authority on all things.

Some people get a little confused about Luther’s relationship with tradition They think he brought this new, unheard of understanding to the Scriptures and represented a radical break in Christianity from its past.  That is not the case.  Yes, he trusted Scripture alone as the ultimate authority, but that doesn’t mean he was ignorant of tradition or uninterested in the Christians that went before him.  Read some of his writings sometime!  You won’t make it far without finding a citation from one of the great thinkers from the first 1500 years of the faith.  The man was a professor that sold books.  His goal wasn’t to prevent people from reading and learning from those who went before him!  His goal was to reconnect with early Christianity and recover the faith from people who had slowly twisted it over the years.  Sola Scriptura doesn’t mean separating yourself from the collected body of Scriptural knowledge and just believing whatever you want to believe about the Bible.  It means learning as much about it as you can about God’s word, educating yourself on what it’s saying to you, and taking it as the authority above any earthly thinker, regardless of how popular they might be.

Well, after he posted his ninety-five theses, things got difficult.  It turns out posting ninety-five reasons why the pope is wrong doesn’t exactly put you in his good graces, and in those days, the pope was shockingly powerful.  Pope Leo X wrote a papal decree called Exsurge Domine, which is Latin for “Arise, O Lord.”  It basically said: “Martin Luther, turn from your heresy or burn for your heresy.  The choice is yours.”  And that brings us back to where we started: an imperial court where a monk is being questioned.  He was asked, “Do you recant your heresy?”  Here is how he responded:

“Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the holy Scriptures or someone can reasonably prove to me that I have erred (for I neither believe in the pope nor the councils alone since it has been established that they often erred and contradicted themselves) I am bound by the Scriptures which I have cited at length and my conscience has been taken captive by the word of God. I am neither able nor willing to recant. Here I stand. I can do no other.”

From there, things got really crazy.  He was whisked back to Saxony, where he went into hiding.  Remember how Frederick the Wise was deeply invested in making Saxony a place where things happen?  Turns out that no matter how devoutly Catholic he was, he wasn’t willing to give over someone who attracted as much attention and sold as many books as Martin Luther.  Martin’s big ideas kept spreading, and more and more people started hearing the things that he was saying.  That is how Protestantism started.

Why do I think this story is worth our consideration?  It’s not like anybody is going around selling indulgences today, right?  After all, why would they?  The average person isn’t convinced they’re particularly sinful.  They may not perceive themselves to be perfect, but they don’t think they’re a bad person, and that ought to be good enough for God.  Works righteousness has made a significant comeback in the modern era; the bar for salvation-worthy works is just a lot lower than it was in Luther’s day.

People simply don’t understand the seriousness of sin anymore!  In an environment like this, we need to remember our solas: sola fide and sola Scriptura.  From whence comes our salvation?  Not from ourselves!  Contrary to popular belief, we’re not particularly good.  We’re saved because God is particularly good.  He’s the only one with the power to save us.  The best thing we can do is to trust our lives in his hands.  To have complete and total faith in him, rather than ourselves.  Sola fide.  And how do we know that this is the case?  Not because we’ve kept up with the philosophical trends of the day particularly well or because we’ve read the articles that have harvested the most clicks.  No.  Our authority is not the shifting sands of public opinion.  It’s Scripture alone. Sola Scriptura.  We look to the word of God and that is our rock and our anchor.

Aside from the solas, Luther’s boldness is so incredible.  He stands for what’s true, even knowing that he might be killed for it.  That’s the level of boldness that the church desperately needs to reclaim today.  Only a few generations ago, it was socially advantageous to participate in a church.  It didn’t matter if someone believed any of it; they were happy just to be participating in a normative institution of American culture and reaping the benefits that came along with it.  You can find records where businessmen with almost no interest in religion move to a new town and immediately join the local church.  Why?  So that they can promote their business and be seen talking to the right sort of people.  People gave up their Sunday mornings to get something tangible.  Churches that participated in that cultural quid pro quo are in a hard place today.  Why?  Because things don’t work that way anymore.  Nobody stands to gain new clients or a good reputation because they go to a local church.  At best, the church is neutral on both of those axes, and at worst, it may actually cost them a good reputation to be a regular participant in an orthodox church.  The next generation of Christians will not be enticed into Christianity because they stand to gain anything in the secular world.  To the contrary, they will have to pay something.

Martin Luther was willing to pay any price when it came to keeping the word of God.  I pray that each of us would be willing to do the same should it fall to us.

Amen.

Relative Truth

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached at The Plains United Methodist Church on October 23, 2022
Scriptures: John 14:5-14, Acts 4:1-13

If you missed last week, we’re doing a series about culture.  Specifically, modern Western culture.  The postmodern era has brought tremendous challenges both to our own discipleship and our ability to share the faith with others, so we’re going to think about what this postmodern era is.  How it functions.  What are these challenges that it has brought and how can we navigate them well?

There’s no more obvious place to start than a conversation about truth.  Postmodernism is defined by a plurality of truths.  The word “truth” may as well be translated into “perspective” or “healthy mindset.”  It would function almost the same.  Think about when you’ve heard people say things like, “I need to speak my truth.”  My truth?  What is my truth?  In no other era would there be this assumption that your truth is different than my truth and our two truths might contradict each other, but they’re both true.  That would have been insane!  Either something IS or it IS NOT truth!  There can’t be two contradictory truths at the same time.  But here and now?  That’s the norm.  Truth is perspective.  It’s whatever is healthy (by our definition) for us.  It’s certainly not a single unified thing that is the same for everyone.

To see this in action, one need look no further than that reality show legend, Survivor.  Yes, I still watch the occasional season of Survivor.  I know it lost it’s magic somewhere around season 32, but I just can’t help myself sometimes.  In any case, in one episode, a tribe was debating which person they should vote out that night.  It was a particularly nasty conversation.  And of course, nobody’s story is lining up.  They all have their own idea about how things should unfold based on who they think the heroes are and who they think the villains are; who is helpful and who is harmful.  This goes on for a while before one woman finally calms everyone down and said, ““You have your truth, I have my truth, and we have to decide how to navigate in the light of all of these truths at tribal council tonight.”  Everyone stopped fighting and nodded as though she’d said something very wise.  Sure enough, there was a delicate peace until the vote that night.

That’s what we’re talking about right there!  Notice that she didn’t say, “We each have our own perspective.”  That would have been accurate, but she didn’t say that.  She said, “We each have our truth.”  As though there were a million different, completely accurate realities that had played out.  Nobody was actually wrong.  Nobody had a warped perception or different goals.  No, they had their own truth.  And arguing wasn’t pointless because they were all competing to be the last one standing on a gameshow and naturally had conflicting goals.  No!  There were just so many truths that they couldn’t be navigated fairly.  To say, “You’re wrong.”  would have been chaos!  To say, “I disagree” wasn’t worth it!   They all had to all be right to stop the fighting, which was totally insane to the viewers at home!  Because we knew what was happening behind the scenes!  We knew that half of the people were lying through their teeth to try to get their way!  They were obviously more interested in winning the game than discovering any kind of truth!  But no.  They all had their own truth.

Why was that woman’s plea so effective?  Surely it would have been easier to just say that we all have our own ideas and settle things at tribal council.  But no.  Each of the players had something more than ideas.  They had their truth.  Social cohesion within the group was only possible insofar as they were willing to give up their claim to the truth.  It didn’t matter if you were honest or dishonest, winning or losing, none of that mattered.  Unity was possible by giving up on truth.  Was it a true unity?  Not really.  But it was an easy unity.  One in which everyone was equally wrong.

That same spirit is present in the Church.  In an effort to be socially acceptable in this new era, in an effort to get a seat at the table, we often give up claims to absolute truth.  Rather than honestly tell people who believe totally different things, “I think you’re wrong,” there’s a temptation to say, “we’re both equally right in our own way.”

There’s an anecdote that I occasionally hear people tell about religious truth.  There are three blindfolded men all in the same room as an elephant.  The first man is standing near its head, so he reaches out and touches its trunk and says, “This animal feels like a snake!”  The second man is near the back of the elephant and he’s sitting down.  He touches the elephant’s leg and says, “No!  It’s like a tree!”  The third man is standing on a ladder, and he reaches out and feels the bristly hairs on the elephant’s back and says, “Nah, it’s probably a horse.”  Who was right?  All of them.  They only knew what their circumstances allowed, but they were all right in their own way.  The implication here is that all religions are fundamentally the same.  All a little wrong.  All a little right.  Who’s to say what’s genuinely real?  But note that for the story to exist at all, there has to be someone in the room that’s seeing these weirdly-positioned men with the elephant!  Otherwise, there would be no story to tell!  Someone has to have an objective point of view.  Chrisitians used to feel comfortable claiming to be that person.  We were the ones who saw when everyone else was blindfolded!  But now?  Now things seem more complicated.

You heard our first passage earlier today.  Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.”  Classic.  That phrase alone makes Jesus such a challenge in a postmodern world, because he doesn’t claim to have a truth.  He claims to be THE truth.  The only truth.  That makes people bristle.  Even pastors!  In one Bible study I attended, someone read this passage and said, “This is why evangelism is so important.  Because Jesus is the only way.  He said so right here.”  Then the pastor spoke up.  “Well, hold on now.  It might say that he is THE way, but I think we need some ontological humility.  We don’t know how Jesus comes to others and how he works with people that we don’t know.  This is him speaking to us, but not to them.  I prefer to imagine him saying, ‘I am a truth, a way, and a life.’  That’s much closer to what he was actually trying to say.”  Where were that pastor’s ideas grounded?  Certainly not in the Bible.  Even if you take these passages back to the Greek, each of those words, way, truth, and life, are preceded by the Greek word “hay.”  That’s an exclusive singular word, not a generic singular.  “The” is undoubtedly the proper translation, not “a”.  And “except through me” could more literally be translated as “if not by me.”  Again, very exclusivist language here.  No, the hesitation wasn’t rooted in the Bible.  It was rooted in postmodern thought.  For Jesus to say that he was THE way was terrifying.  Far too cocky.  Far too self-assured.  And so, to translate the Bible “with humility,” it had to deliberately be mistranslated.  That’s how frightening absolute truth claims are in the modern world.

And it’s not just claims in the Bible that are “adjusted.”  It’s the way we consider our own faith.  A different pastor explained to me once that they believed that they believed that Jesus was God.  I said, “So you believe that’s true, in other words.”  And they said, “I wouldn’t go that far.  I believe that it’s my belief.  I don’t feel comfortable talking about what’s true.  Who am I to say what’s true?”  Who am I to say what’s true… And we wonder why evangelism has fallen on such hard times.  “Hello, I want to talk to you about Jesus.  I believe it’s my belief that he’s a way to living.  And if you don’t like that, it may not be your truth, but it’s my truth.”  What a life-changing prospect to be given something that’s so totally peripheral to your existence.

Postmodern life has shifted the way we think.  We’re afraid of admitting that we have THE truth to all of existence.  We’re afraid of a Jesus that would actually claim to be THE truth.  And so we change our language to appeal to a new culture.  What if Jesus was just an option?  Just a way.  Just a belief you can hold.  And if you don’t like him, that’s fine!  But if you do, then come to church.  Jesus becomes a product in the grand supermarket of beliefs.  He’s great!  Unless he’s not the product you’re looking for, in which case just go a few isles over and try out buddhism or agnosticism or any other thing.   The customer is always right!  Find what suits you.  That’s your truth.

In the battle for people’s hearts and minds, Christians have made a strategic retreat from the concept of absolute truth in the hopes of gaining ground later on other topics.  But when you retreat from a concept as central to the Christian message as truth, everything else collapses after it.  What began as a strategic retreat turned out to be a rout, stacking loss after loss after loss.  

To be a Christian in the postmodern era, we have to wake up to the core of what Jesus was and what we’re supposed to be.  We have to yearn for truth.  Not the safe, comfortable, postmodern truth that is self-contradictory and optional.  We have to pursue real truth. Absolute truth.  The kind that says, “This is how the world is, and if you don’t agree with it, you’re wrong.”  The kind that says, “This is how the world is, and if I don’t live it out, I’m wrong.”  A truth that doesn’t snivel and beg for consideration, but commands respect.  A truth that we may not fully comprehend in every aspect, but one that doesn’t for one second become anything less than binding.  And that’s not to say we can’t be humble.  Of course we need to be humble.  But our humility has to be humility to the truth first and foremost.  If Jesus is God, we have to humbly accept that and accept nothing else.  If he’s not, we need to move on.

As someone who was an atheist, I’m passionate about this.  I hear people say that Christianity is a way but there are many other equally good ways and I shudder.  Because being a Christian is not easy.  It’s hard.  It takes constant repentance, study, and devotion.  It takes self-denial, self-awareness, and the boldness and courage necessary to witness to others.  It’s not comfortable!  You have to give your life completely to something greater than yourself.  If all of this is optional, I’d quit so fast your head would spin.  If I can get the same results by doing whatever I want, I’m gonna go do whatever I want.  If Christianity isn’t true, it’s certainly a much less attractive option than raw hedonism.  I’d take that any day of the week!  If Jesus isn’t actually God, if his commandments aren’t actually binding, if he didn’t actually break the powers of sin and darkness on the cross, if he doesn’t command my heart, my soul, my all any more than my couch does, then why bother?  Christianity is either uniquely true or an unnecessarily rigorous option in the marketplace of ideas.

And that’s the thing about historic Christianity.  Never before the postmodern era did Christianity claim to be a neat way of living for those that were interested.  It rose precisely because it claimed to be the ultimate truth by which everything else was truly seen.  It was the light in the darkness.  It was in a way that nothing else could ever be.  Let’s turn to our second reading here Acts 4:1-13.  We have Peter and John, and they have gone to the temple where tey met a man who couldn’t walk.  They healed him and they started preaching.  Of course, the temple is the seat of religious power in this area, so it starts to cause trouble.  That’s where we pick up.

1 The priests and the captain of the temple guard and the Sadducees came up to Peter and John while they were speaking to the people. 2 They were greatly disturbed because the apostles were teaching the people, proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection of the dead.

Keep in mind, preaching the resurrection of the dead would have been very controversial here.  The Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection of the dead.  They were a bit of an outlier.  The Pharisees did believe in the resurrection and they were much more popular with the common Israelite.  The Pharisees were men of the people; the Sadducees were men of the aristocracy.  Even if their belief was outside the norm, these men were not to be taken lightly.  Talking about the resurrection of the dead on their turf would have been considered a very bad move.

3 They seized Peter and John and, because it was evening, they put them in jail until the next day. 4 But many who heard the message believed; so the number of men who believed grew to about five thousand.

Only a few chapters earlier it said that three thousand people believed, but now we’re already at five thousand!  They didn’t get there because things were easy!  Because it was just so darn delightful!  No, there was active persecution towards those who were preaching about Jesus!  But the Church grew, not because it was pleasant or easy, but because it was bold!  This was something that people had to take notice of!

5 The next day the rulers, the elders and the teachers of the law met in Jerusalem.

Now we have a list of names.  A few of them should be familiar.  Caiaphas especially, who was involved in the crucifixion of Christ.

6 Annas the high priest was there, and so were Caiaphas, John, Alexander and others of the high priest’s family.7 They had Peter and John brought before them and began to question them: “By what power or what name did you do this?”

8 Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them: “Rulers and elders of the people! 9 If we are being called to account today for an act of kindness shown to a man who was lame and are being asked how he was healed, 10 then know this, you and all the people of Israel: It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed. 11 Jesus is

‘the stone you builders rejected,
 which has become the cornerstone.’

12 Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.”

That’s a bold claim.  That is precisely the kind of claim that made people uncomfortable across the spectrum of society.  Both the Israelites and the Romans would balk at this.  First, there’s the Israelites.  Did they believe in a savior?  Sure.  But they believed in a savior that was only for them.  He was a military hero!  He’d come and kick out the foreigners and restore Israel to its rightful place on the world stage.  This was a personal savior only for Israelites.  Outsiders didn’t have any business with him.  At best, news about the savior would be neutral for them, and at worst, the news was about their impending downfall.  Israelites already earned their savior by virtue of their birth.  They were waiting for him all this time.  Now these men are talking about a savior that isn’t honoring their birthright?  And this savior is for everyone?  Absurd.  The Israelites loved their good news and most of them genuinely believed it, but their good news was for them alone.

The claims would have caused just as much trouble in Roman society.  They were happy to have as many gods as you can imagine!  If a neighboring country had some gods that they were excited about, great!  Add them to the pantheon.  No big deal.  They would even show how open they were to new gods by making public sacrifices to their enemy’s gods before combat.  After the battle was over, they would claim that those gods obviously liked the Romans better.  Otherwise they would have won!  Sacrificing to enemy gods wasn’t just for bragging rights after the battle.  It also showed the enemy that their gods weren’t a problem.  They could keep their gods.  They just had to bend the knee to Caesar.  Their gods could stick around as long as he played nice with the others.  As long as that god didn’t claim to be THE god, there was no problem.  That’s why one of the earliest charges that Romans would make against Christians was atheism.  People were martyred over that!   Denying the existence of the other gods was horrifying to Romans!  One god wasn’t nearly enough for a fair-minded, tolerant person.

13 When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.

I love this verse especially.  They assumed that these men in the temple must have been powerful or influential.  Maybe they were self-styled mystical gurus or a couple of aristocrats trying to gain power.  Maybe they were even some kind of rare religious scholars with years of research under their belts.  They had to be big shots in some way, shape, or form to be making claims like that!  But then they start to interact with Peter and John and they realize that these are just regular guys.  They’re not even pretending to be better than anyone else.  There’s no arrogance about them.  There’s a humility.  They’re just average people that somehow found the truth, and now they cling to it more than life itself.

The elders and teachers of the law send the disciples out of the room so they can deliberate and they decide to warn them never to do anything like this again.  We pick up at verse 18:

18 Then they called them in again and commanded them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. 19 But Peter and John replied, “Which is right in God’s eyes: to listen to you, or to him? You be the judges! 20 As for us, we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.”

These were humble men, but also ones that were totally transformed by this truth that they’ve found.

We’ve established that absolute truth was core to the Christian message from the beginning.  We’ve established that postmodern Westerners have a really hard time accepting that there is any one genuinely true truth.  So how do we fight for truth in a way that’s intriguing?  How do we promote truth in a way that’s beautiful?

That’s the thing.  Christian truth is beautiful.  God became man and died for us?  God loves us so much that he pursues us even when we’re fleeing him?  The awful things that people do in this world aren’t just subjectively distasteful but genuinely wrong.  And God wants to build a new world by transforming us by his grace.  And in the end, God wins.  THAT’S beautiful.  All of that is beautiful. 

But let’s be honest, people don’t get hung up on that.  People get hung up on parts that they don’t like.  They don’t like what the Bible says on certain topics.  They can’t understand what certain parts of Christian doctrine really mean.  They can’t imagine a God that would say something that they don’t like.  To go back to the metaphor of the supermarket of ideas, they’re standing in the isle, trying to pick out what religion is best for them, and Christianity keeps telling them that they’re wrong about things and need to get with the program.  How offensive.  How absolutely rude.  Why on earth would they pick a product that doesn’t fit them?

But Christianity doesn’t claim to be a product.  It claims to be the truth.

This world doesn’t need more products.  It doesn’t need more philosophies that excuse us doing whatever it is we want in a given moment.  It needs something that dares to bind the world together with more than mutual apathy.  It needs something that dares to tell people, “God cares about you so much that he’s not content to leave you where you’re at.  He cares about everything you do.  He cares about the dumb stuff you post on social media at midnight.  He cares about what you read and what you do and how you act.”  We are not our own.  God will not rubber stamp whatever we feel is acceptable.

The strength of the postmodern mindset is that nobody ever has to feel wrong.  You have your truth and nobody can argue with that.  The weakness is that we KNOW things are already wrong and we need something to change it.  And can we change it?  We in all of our sin?  We who can’t get through the week without doing something that we’re not proud of?  You wanna put all your eggs in that basket?  Or is there something greater that we can turn to.  Someone that is better than our best.  Someone that just might actually be able to clean all this up.

That’s why Jesus is good news to the postmodern person.  He makes the claim to objectively be at the heart of everything.  We have the opportunity to not just live out our own random, selfish, made-up, self-satisfying claims, but to OBJECTIVELY transcend our own nature.  In a world where evil stands strong as ever, a philosophy built on mutually leaving one another to our own devices is not enough.  We need to be held accountable for our actions, philosophies, and desires.  We need objective truth.  We need God



West Ohio UMC Disaffiliation Materials

~ Vincent

Since the announcement that I’m leaving the UMC to join the Global Methodist Church, I’ve had a ton of people come to me asking for more information on the split. A lot of people that are asking are from UMC churches with pastors that have no interest in disaffiliation and aren’t really telling their congregations much about it, but others are just people from other denominations that are curious about what’s going on. Several area churches have started using this material to consider disaffiliation, so I figured it was time to make it more widely available.

Here are the handouts for the classes that I held to lead my congregation through a disaffiliation discernment process. I wanted to make sure that there was no cause to end our process on a technicality, so I made sure to bounce the elements off of my local District Superintendent before presenting it. The material was made in the West Ohio Conference of the UMC, so the statistics reflect our conference as of January in 2023. Certain conferences require you to use more rigorous processes that favor the UMC pretty heavily, so this may not meet the requirements of non-West Ohio conferences, but I think it’s a great starting point for educating yourself and others regardless of your location. And if you’re not United Methodist, the sheer amount of history makes it worth reading, in my humble opinion. I know I learned a lot while creating it.

I did genuinely try to make something that’s balanced. There’s no point in destroying a straw-man of your opponent in the age of the internet. People can all get online and double check anything you say, so I really worked to cite everything and represent people’s opinions in their own words. Every person I cited in these materials is either a bishop, a bestselling pastor/author, or a seminary professor. Not every person I quoted is from the UMC or the GMC. The authors especially represent a broader picture of evangelical Christians and progressive Christians. That said, most of the authors representing positions that are consistent with the UMC’s perspective are from denominations that the UMC is in full communion with, and most of the perspectives representing the GMC are from evangelicals that pastors consistently look to across denominational lines. These are the figures that publish the studies that Methodists on both sides read in Sunday School. They create the YouTube videos and podcasts that inform our thoughts. They all deserve your attention.

Again, I like to imagine the material is fair for both sides. I believe that’s why it’s started to gain some momentum. I’ve worked in progressive churches and I’ve worked in traditionalist churches, and I tried to imagine, “How can I do right by the people in both places?” If you’re more traditionalist, you’ll notice that I didn’t bring up most of the more egregious violations of the discipline by the UMC. Yes, some really high up people are doing bad things and it does need addressing, but I didn’t think it was representative of the average UMC believer. If you’re more progressive, you’ll probably be frustrated that I represented the UMC as a more progressive church, rather than a “big tent for all people.” When half of the people in the big tent are leaving because they don’t feel represented, you’re no longer a big tent. When all of the people leaving are of a particular theological standpoint (traditionalists), you ought to realize that you’ve become the other half of the argument (progressive).

If you’re Methodist considering disaffiliation, remember, the cutoff for the current protocol is the end of 2023! I hope this helps Methodist congregations have honest conversations about what they believe and helps inform non-Methodists about what’s going on in our world.

PS: Do the homework if you can. Those readings are fantastic.

the-big-split-session-1Download
the-big-split-session-2Download
the-big-split-session-3Download

the Gospel in a postmodern world

~ Vincent

Preached at The Plains United Methodist Church on October 16, 2022
Scriptures: Psalm 23, Ezekiel 20:18-31

Our first reading this morning was Psalm 23, and it was a version that I know I wasn’t used to.  When it comes to classic Scriptures, my mind just expects the King James version.  When I hear the NIV, it catches me off guard!  Here’s yet another translation of Psalm 23 that’s worth hearing:

The Great Boss is the one who takes care of my sheep;
I don’t want to own anything.
The Great Boss wants me to lie down in the field.
He wants me to go to the lake.
He makes my good spirit come back.
Even though I walk through something the missionary calls the valley of the shadow of death,
I do not care.  You are with me.
You use a stick and a club to make me comfortable. 
You manufacture a piece of furniture right in front of my eyes while my enemies watch. 
You pour car grease on my head.
My cup has too much water in it and therefore overflows. 
Goodness and kindness will walk single file behind me all of my life. 
And I will live in the Hut of the great boss until I die and am forgotten by my tribe.

(Richards and O’Brien, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, 91)

This psalm was translated by missionaries from Hebrew into the language of the Khmus tribe of Laos and then to English.  It’s always fun to find something that’s been through several translations because certain ideas inevitably get lost in the process. You get to see the limitations of language and just how hard it is to capture the essence of something in a tongue that might not might not even have words for certain things.  I mean, just look at verse five!  “You manufacture a piece of furniture right in front of my eyes.  You pour car grease on my head.” God preparing a table in the presence of our enemies also becomes a more literal task than we usually assume.  And I’m guessing olive oil isn’t common in that region, so instead of that, we end up with car grease on our heads.  We also have the confusion in verse four where it reads, “Even though I walk through something the missionary calls ‘the valley of the shadow of death.’” They were so confused by what that missionary was trying to talk about that they just gave up on translating the idea entirely. “‘Even though I walk through…’ oh geeze.  I don’t know. Whatever that thing was that the missionary was going on about!  That!”  But the part I really want to hone in on is the last line “and I will live in the hut of the Great Boss until I die and am forgotten by my tribe.” That’s a lot grimmer than what it is in English, “I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” That’s distinctly more positive than being forgotten.  Why is it so negative?

One of the biggest reasons for that negative tone is the Khmus tribe’s culture.  They live in a collectivist culture.  People in collectivist cultures tend to think of themselves as one piece of a larger cohesive social unit.  When they’re asked to describe themselves, they tend to explain the social relationships that they play a part in: “I’m a father,” “I’m a nurse,” “I’m a sister.”  Their self-identity is built on the relationships that they participate in and the obligations they have towards others.  That’s a very different outlook from us people in individualist cultures.  Individualist cultures tend to focus on how each individual is unique and has their own goals and purpose.  If we were asked to describe ourselves, our descriptors would probably point out the ways that we’re different from the people around us: “I’m smart,” “I’m hard-working,” “I’m strong.”  Our self-identity is wrapped up in the ways they’re unique from other people.  There can be hesitance about the idea of Heaven from people in collectivist cultures.  It sounds like they have to be torn away from the social network that defines who they are.  That’s no good! 

On top of that, the Khmus people think about death in a very different way than your average Westerner.  If you go back to ancient Greece, you can see some of the very early ways that Westerners started to think about death.  In Greek mythology, when you died, you had to pay the boatman, Charon, so that you could cross the river Styx and go on to the land of the dead.  You went from here to there.  We’re hardwired to be comfortable with the idea that death is going from here to there.  In Khmus culture, there’s no sense that death involves going anywhere.  When you die, nobody can see you, but you’re still there with your people.  Going somewhere after you die seems bizarre to them.  Between the collectivist urge to find identity in relationships and the sense that leaving after death is odd, you end up with a disappointing end to a classic psalm.

That being said, it is interesting that missionaries have found that there are parts of Scripture that resonate with them that we have trouble with.  For example, Revelation 21 says that God will recreate everything in the end.  He’ll make a new Heaven and a new Earth, and that new Earth is where all of his people will go.  We don’t just stay in Heaven forever!  We go to a perfect, sinless, recreated Earth.  Then and only then will everything finally be as God would have it.  I don’t know how many times I’ve told this to churchgoers and they’ve looked at me like I’m crazy.  To the average Westerner, death is going from here to there.  That just makes sense.  You don’t go from here to there and then back to a new form of here again.  That’s counterintuitive!  But the Khmus people heard about this passage and were incredibly excited.  Finally, something that made some sense!  You get to come back to a new Earth in the long term.  That was a reasonable sort of plan in their eyes.

Cultures make such a difference in the way we perceive the world.  They’re these collections of ancestral ideas that are tweaked and passed down time and time again.  They’re critical to understanding the world.  All too often, in modern Western culture, there’s this temptation to see someone’s culture as little more than window dressing.  It determines whether you wear a sari or a dress.  It determines whether you celebrate Christmas or Kwanza.  Things like that.  Underneath our clothes and our celebrations, it’s assumed that we’re all decent secular citizens that broadly share the same ideas.  Culture appears to be little more than some seasoning for our otherwise flavorless lives.  But it is so much more than that. 

When we reduce culture to window dressing, we fail to capture the essence of it.  Cultures pass on more than clothes; they pass on ideas.  Tremendously good ideas and tremendously bad ones can both be passed on!  The ancient Spartans would kill children with any deformities.  Why?  Because they needed to be a strong, warrior society.  To them, that was a good idea.  It was a natural idea.  But what seems logical to them seems horrifying to us!  The Aztecs believed in human sacrifice.  If things weren’t going so well, they assumed that sacrificing someone might perk things up.  To us?  Horrifying.  To them?  Logical.  Some may resist calling this culture.  No, this is a matter of morality!  But consider that in Japan only 200 years ago, cultural tradition dictated that someone who made a big, humiliating mistake ought to kill themselves.  That showed that they had some shred of honor left in them.  To live after your mistake?  That was shameful.  To modern Westerners, that seems nightmarish!  If you make a mistake, even a horrible one, you’re expected to build back!  It happens to everybody.  You hear folk wisdom about how it’s not the number of times you get knocked down that matters; it’s the number of times you get back up.  To a 17th century samurai, that would have been the height of cowardice.  Culture is not just window dressing.  It changes our perception of the world itself. It affects what ideas we accept as good ideas, and what ideas we’re wary of.

Now, why do I keep talking about culture?  Because I think we need to address our own culture.  A few weeks back, I was having a conversation with some of the people over in the contemporary service.  Some of the band members were around my age (30-something), and we were just shocked at how much things have changed in the religious sphere since we were young.  It hasn’t even been that long!  We’re not that old!  But it’s changed so much.  When we were young, being Christian was pretty normal.  It’s what you did.  Of course we went to church.  That was pretty reasonable.  Most people did.  You could wear a “What Would Jesus Do” wristband and that was considered reasonably cool.  You watched VeggieTales because of course you watched Veggie Tales.  VeggieTales was awesome!  We couldn’t imagine any of that being popular today.

Christianity is no longer seen as something mainstream.  It’s seen as something odd. Something weird.  Something that’s hard to swallow.  And you can see that in the statistics. Someone that goes into undergrad as a confessing Christian has lower than a 30 percent chance of remaining a Christian over the next four years.  Depending on the poll, you can get as low as 18%.  30% is the high.  I spoke with some people in campus ministry at Ohio University this past week and they confirmed that it was incredibly tough to work in campus ministry.  They said that God’s Not Dead was a little too cheesy to be a reasonable comparison, but the natural cultural environment on a campus made Christianity really hard to practice for the average student.

College campuses aren’t the only place we can turn to for sobering statistics.  If we look at our own denomination, the United Methodist Church lost a net total of 180,000 active members from their lists last year.  The year before that, they lost 220,000 total active members.  We’re only a few million big!  We can’t take losses like this year after year, but people are dying faster than we can make new disciples.

A lot of us may be initially disheartened by these statistics, but we need to fight that reaction. I remember talking to a friend from England.  England is much further along in the process of secularization in the United States.  The number of confessing Christians there is even lower than the number here, and he was wrestling with that.  I got to hear one of his very early sermons and, man, it was just depressing.  His through line was, “The church is dying, and there’s nothing we can do.” He said that throughout the sermon, time and time and time again.  That was the line he ended on!   I left church that morning thinking, well shoot, how am I supposed to go enjoy brunch after that?  Right?  That’s grim!  I’m not one who believes that  sermons have an obligation to be peppy, but the gloom and doom approach is the wrong approach.  We shouldn’t count all of this as some sort of grand failure.  There’s more than that in front of us: there’s opportunity.  We have the opportunity to serve God at a historic moment!  We get to witness to a Western culture that has forgotten the most important thing there is.  That is new ground!  There have always been missionaries called to share the Gospel in challenging places, but the post-Christian West is still brand new on the world stage, and we’re the first ones called to spread the Gospel here.

Just look at how new this whole thing is!  There was obviously a time in Western nations for initial conversions.  We wouldn’t be here without those.  There were also times where individual people and even whole people groups were called back to the faith, but that’s just the thing!  They were called back to faith.  That cultural Christianity from the initial conversion was still strong in their minds.  People didn’t have to argue about whether or not Christianity was good or explain what its most basic premises were.  That was obvious!  The average citizen literally learned in schools that the goal of life was to love God and to glorify him forever.  That was a logical fact that even a child could tell you!  Evangelization wasn’t built on education or argument; it was built on convicting people to live out what they already knew was true.  That’s the history of Methodism.  How did Methodism get so big?  Because when America was a young nation, Methodist pastors had maximum enthusiasm, minimal educational requirements, and were willing to travel.  Baptists were the same way.  Those groups could get new pastors to frontier regions really quickly to convict people with a classic evangelistic sell: “You should be worshiping the God you know exists and live a life that’s pleasing to him.”  That’s why there are so many Methodist and Baptist churches across the United States.  They did so well because they were experts at reaching people that were already Christians that lived beyond the reach of established churches.  It doesn’t work like that anymore. We are now missionaries in a culture the likes of which we’ve never seen.  If we want to share the word of God with people, we can’t call them back to the faith they already know.  Culturally, it’s no longer dominant.  It doesn’t seem true or intuitive.  A lot of people may not even fully understand what it is!  We have to change the way we think about outreach if we want to be effective.

I’m sure some of you are thinking to yourselves, “Hold on now, pastor, you’re saying we have to change the way that we go about doing things if we want to reach people with the word of God?  Not so!  I’ve seen some of the big churches around here and I know there’s three timeless things you need to grow a church: better preaching, better music, programs for families.  Do those three things your church will grow.  That’s what the big churches do!  If we do those three things, that’ll work.  Simple as that.”

 To that I respond: you’re not completely wrong.  You can do that… for now.  It kind of works.  Some large area churches do use that methodology.  They’re primarily reaching out to people that are already interested; people that I will call “cultural conservatives.” Of course, that doesn’t necessarily correspond to political conservatism.  That’s neither here nor there. In this instance, cultural conservatives are people that just like things from the past.  They might live in an area where they grew up, just because their family has roots there.  They might take up certain hobbies or historic styles of dress that aren’t particularly trendy anymore.  They might even explore Christianity!  And why?  Because they just have a certain affinity with the past. They enjoy things that connect them with their roots.  In the case of religion, this pull to the past is a massive blessing for them.  In following their inclination, they may stumble onto the beauty of the Gospel  But not everyone is going to do that.  Not everyone is a cultural conservative.  A lot of people will be looking at what is popular, rather than looking at things that have faded from popular imagination.  They’re not naturally interested in Christianity.  That’s their grandparents’ religion!  They went to a few services at Christmas to make ‘ol grandma happy, but it wasn’t trendy.  They think they know Christianity enough from cultural osmosis that it’s safe to dismiss it  They’d prefer engaging with something that has more of a contemporary buzz around it.

If we only reach out to people who are already interested, the group we’re reaching is going to get smaller and smaller.  Maybe we’ll get some cultural conservatives to join us, but will their children also be cultural conservatives?  What about their children’s children?  You get diminishing returns over time.  God doesn’t want us to just reach out to people that are easy to talk to.  We have to reach people beyond the reach of our safe, cultural boundaries!

We are people at the dawn of a new era.  We have the privilege of sharing the good news of Jesus with people who think they know it when they don’t. And the best part is God hasn’t demanded that we just keep grinding away with the same programs, the same slogans, and the same outreach opportunities year after year after year.  He did not tell his church we had already achieved the ideal final form and we’re obligated to keep it for all time.  He said something more exciting than that!  He said, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation,” (Mk 16:15).  And what is that good news?  Christ died so that we could live. This is a life-altering truth, and we have the opportunity to take that to people.  That’s exciting.  It’s not all gloom and doom.  We’ve got something amazing to share.

I know that some people are intimidated about sharing their faith.  It’s been built up as this big, frightening, socially-awkward thing, and it shouldn’t be any of that.  I think C.S Lewis gives a helpful corrective for that fear of evangelism.  He asks, what do you do when you find a really good restaurant?  You tell people about it!  What about if you find a scenic vista?  You tell people about it!  That’s how we’re built!  When we find something that’s good, we want to share it.  And what greater good is there than the truth at the center of all things?  We should naturally want to reach out! 

That’s a passion that you have shared with me since I arrived at this church.  You’ve told me that you want more people in this church.  If you want to do that, you have to be missionaries in this new era.  You have to learn how to reach out in spite of a resistant culture.  Not every missionary shares our unique challenges!  There are some places where Christianity is growing rapidly, like Asia and Africa.  North America and Europe?  Not so much.  This place is a challenge.  If we want to reach out well, we have to learn the culture.  That’s what missionaries do!  That’s not the totality of evangelism, of course. You can’t deal with people in abstract.  The heart of it is always personal relationships, but how can you communicate well in those relationships?  By knowing a person’s culture.  You need to know what ideas will excite them, what they’ll freak out about, and what will likely feel natural to them.  That’s not to say you tailor the gospel to suit them.  Of course not.  You do, however, need to know how to share the truth compellingly with the person you want to share it with.

The advantages of a cultural study extend beyond evangelism.  Even if that were the only benefit, it would be worth doing, but there’s more than that.  As we study our culture for the sake of others, we learn about ways in which it’s impacted our vision of God.  Some of the things that we assume are godly are not in alignment with God’s will!  When we sit down and see how the philosophies of the day have impacted us, we get to learn about our own blind spots and learn how we can follow God better.  This second Scripture shows the Israelites experiencing this second benefit.  God is showing them the ways that they have been blinded because of cultural norms that seemed intuitive, but were wrong.  It starts in Ezekial chapter 20 verse 18:

I said to their children in the wilderness, “Do not follow the statutes of your parents or keep their laws or defile yourselves with their idols. I am the Lord your God; follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

From the beginning of this passage, God is reminding the Israelites that he’s given them something so precious: the truth.  It’s not just an abstract, theoretical truth.  It’s a whole way of being.  He’s given that truth to them to keep, but repeatedly they’ve walked away from it to take on the accepted norms of the day.  As we continue on, we’ll see three different disobedient cultural practices that the Israelites always seem to come back around to.  They do these things throughout the Old Testament.  When you read the prophetic books or make your way through Kings or Chronicles, you’re sure to come across these three sooner or later.  The Israelites can’t seem to leave them alone!  They naturally assume these are reasonable practices, even though they’re repeatedly warned against them.  

First, we have the high places.  God asks them in verse 29, “What is this high place you go to?”  He didn’t want them revering these particular places!  But they sure seem to think he does!  Now, a high place is not necessarily literally high up off the ground.  It might be!  Verse 28 reads that any high hills or leafy trees were tempting for the Israelites to make a big deal out of, but throughout the whole of Scripture, not all of them are so elevated in a literal sense.  High places are often metaphorically high up.  These are places of all types that people saw and thought, “That’s close to Heaven!  God would like it if I worshiped there.”  Now, what makes them think that certain places are holier than others?  Associations with past Gods that they worshiped.  Can you imagine how insulting that is for God?  Imagine if you told your spouse that for your anniversary, you were going to a special spot: the place where you first kissed.  They get all excited and you drive them out there that evening and as you pull up they tell you… it’s the wrong place.  You never kissed them there!  That was some other person!  But rather than back down, you double down!  If it was good enough for someone else, it ought to be good enough for them!  You park the car and try to keep celebrating the anniversary.  How do you think that would go over?  They want to worship God in a place that was special… to some other god!  It’s insulting!

But it’s worse than that.  These other gods were not like God.  They demanded different ways of worshiping, and these ways were profane.  They wanted human sacrifice, ritual prostitution, and other such things at their high places.  The true God doesn’t want anything to do with that!  He hates things like that!  He has no historically special relationship with these high places and he knows the associations they have with them are often impure, so he repeatedly tells them to stay away from them.  But whenever the Israelites get the chance, they think to themselves, “You know what God would really like?  The high places!  He’d love those!  He says he doesn’t, but someone must have misinterpreted him.  We’ve had such good memories in those places!  Good enough for other gods, good enough for this one.  Let’s go worship there!”  Not good.

You also see idolatry mentioned several times.  Verse 24 says that “their eyes lusted after their parents’ idols.”  The Israelites were very physical people.  They liked things that they could see and touch.  That made them feel more real.  Now, did they always worship the idol directly?  Not always.  Sometimes they were stand-ins for the god in question.  People thought that if they worshiped the image, they could grow closer to the god in whose image that idol was created.  God always commanded people not to do this!  If they were worshiping the idol in and of itself, they were worshiping something that was not real.  And if they were worshiping a God beyond the idol… that was still not real!  God is infinitely bigger than anything our minds can come up with.  When an idol is created, it’s always something less than the real thing.  Something more limited.  When you really think about it, the process of creating an idol for God is blasphemous.  It fundamentally reverses the order of creation.  God created us in his image.  When we make an idol of him, we turn around and try to make him in our image.  God wants nothing to do with the shallowness of our idols and tells us to avoid them.  But what did the Isralites do?  They get to thinking, “You know what God would like?  Some idols.  That’s the sort of thing gods like! It’s just a fact.  Everyone knows it!”  But God doesn’t actually like them.

Now we have what may be the most dramatic instance of disobedience in the Bible: child sacrifice.  Verse 31 reads, “When you offer your gifts—the sacrifice of your children in the fire—you continue to defile yourselves with all your idols to this day.”  Child sacrifice would have been something that the rival god Molech would have enjoyed.  Some of the groups around the Israelites worshiped Molech.  They would burn up their child, literally, in fire.  That was a good thing in the eyes of Molech.  That’s how you pleased him.  And the Israelites thought, child sacrifice?  I bet God would like that.”  Now, God has explicitly said not to do that.  There is a sacrifice necessary to make things right, but he will make it himself.  He will be the ultimate sacrifice on our behalf.  Our sacrifices are not good.  God doesn’t want people to sacrifice their children.  But the Israelites ignore God and do what is right in their own eyes.

You can see repeatedly that the Israelites are influenced by the trends of the people around them.  The tribes in their region lead them to make choices that are bad!  That fundamentally warp their view of who God is so far that God says, “That’s that’s not even me anymore!  You’re doing something horrible!  Stop!”

Taking the time to think about the culture that we’re in is not just for the sake of people outside the Church.  It’s for us!  When we critique culture, it’s not something we get to do at a distance.  It’s not us looking out at the outside world and seeing how they think.  It’s uncovering some of the assumptions we make too.  Culture is something we live and breathe.  We are inevitably affected by anything that we can point out and consider.  So as we look through this series, we’re not just seeing things that can help us be good missionaries in this new post-modern era.  We’ll learn things that can help us know God better and worship him rightly.  Remember, his thoughts are not our thoughts, and his ways are not our ways.

If we want to understand the nuances of God, our neighbor, and ourselves, this is the task we have before us.  In the coming weeks, we’ll look piece by piece at our postmodern Western culture.  How was it shaped?  What are the assumptions that it presses on us?  In what ways does it help us, and in what ways does it challenge us?  And in spite of its challenges, how can we be effective at making disciples?  I hope that each of us gets the opportunity to think about the way we can reach others with this precious truth we’ve been gifted with, and that we ourselves grow to recognize that truth even more perfectly.  Amen.

Series: The Gospel in a Postmodern World

~ Vincent

I don’t usually post sermons on here. This is a place for sharing cool things from my random studies, not sermons. It feels a little lazy to just throw all of my church work up here equally. If people want sermons, they’ll hunt them down on the church’s YouTube channel. That being said, sermons are an underappreciated medium. They tend not to get much attention after the Sunday they were preached, and sometimes, a little extra consideration is merited. This past year, there was one sermon series that I was particularly pleased with: “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” I’ll be adapting the series to a written form and posting it here. If you’re looking to learn more about evangelizing and existing as the Church in the postmodern era, this is for you.

United No More

~ Vincent

The United Methodist Church was, in hindsight, a pretty bad name for our denomination. I can’t count the number of times that there was something controversial going on in a conference and someone would say, “UNITED Methodist?!? Why are we called united? We’re NOT united at all!” Which is fair. When you’re a part of a massive entity that’s been struggling to identify what exactly it is for as long as anyone can remember, having a name that begins with “united” must seem pretty silly. But that word didn’t get there because we were so wildly harmonious! We were named “United” Methodists because of a church merger. The Evangelical United Brethren Church and the Methodist Church came together in 1968 to create the United Methodist Church. “United” is a nod to the EUB side of the merger.

The EUB was a much smaller church than the MC. Previously EUB congregants represented about 7 percent of total UMC congregants after the merger. That being said, this all happened the zenith of Methodist power in the United States, so the EUB’s membership was still nothing to sneeze at. There are quite a few denominations around today that wish they were as big as the 750,000 member EUB church! Sizes aside, the goal of the merger was to forge a marriage of equals. There was this great ecumenical hope that more and more churches would find common ground and come together, so nobody wanted to kill that enthusiasm by creating the appearance that the MC gobbled up the EUB. Again and again during the merger, people sought out ways to ensure that EUB distinctives and heritage would be protected going forward.

But did it work? Not really. The fact that the average person doesn’t know why “united” is in the name is pretty clear evidence of that. And why should they know that? Who cares about some boring ‘ol historical details. As long as a fact sounds like an answer to a trivia question, it’s going to seem trivial in people’s hearts and minds. Education about the Evangelical United Brethren Church are still requirements in United Methodist seminaries, but again, as long as it’s kept safely in the Methodist History section, it’s not going to become something that pastors make use of in their ministry. John Meunier recorded a little piece of a General Conference petition on his blog that specifically laments several ways in which the Methodist side of the merger hasn’t honored the full heritage of the EUB. Unfortunately, the original source that he linked to has since been removed, so a big thanks to him for preserving this little piece of history:

A widespread, but largely overlooked obstacle to being an inclusive church is the omission of United from our church name and the name of our people. The Methodist Church ceased as an organization on April 23, 1968, as did The Evangelical United Brethren Church (EUB). On that date, The United Methodist Church was born, a new church created by the marriage of the two former bodies. This was the  intention of the Plan of Union. When the word United is omitted, it suggests that the marriage was a pretense and that the union was, as some disappointed former EUB’s have termed it, a hostile corporate takeover.

Since 1980, the General Conference has declared that omitting United from our church name is “unacceptable usage.” Yet the practice continues in conversation and in print. Former EUB’s are not being oversensitive about a few syllables. When Methodist is used in place of our proper name, it becomes, to them, a painful reminder of more than a dozen serious betrayals of the spirit of union and inclusiveness:

1. Glorifying Wesley and Asbury, while ignoring or belittling the inheritances from Otterbein, Boehm, and Albright.
2. Abandoning beloved EUB institutions, including Westmar College, Otterbein Press, Kamp Koinonia, and the Church and Home magazine.
3. Cutting off EUB clergy widows from their only pension income, the dividends from Otterbein Press.
4. Repeated attempts to close United Theological Seminary.
5. Identifying Heritage Sunday with Aldersgate Sunday in 1976 and 2004.
6. Removing the EUB Hymnal from circulation and canceling its status as an official United Methodist hymnal in 1972 .
7. Including only two EUB hymns in the 1988 United Methodist Hymnal.
8. Replacing “debts” or “sins” in the Lord’s Prayer with “trespasses.”
9. Excluding the EUB service of infant dedication from The Book of Worship.
10. Restoring the Lovely Lane Chapel while leaving the EUB birthplace, the Peter Kemp Farmhouse, just a few miles away, to the fickle mercies of a secular economy bent on commercial expansion.
11. Suppressing the fact that the twin flames in the cross-and-flame emblem represent the Methodist and EUB traditions and that, when depicted correctly, the two flames are equal in size.
12. Closing a disproportionate number of former EUB churches (28 percent of those closed between 1975 and 1985).
13. Representing an ash-less Ash Wednesday, the EUB practice and the universal Protestant practice before 1970, as “un-United Methodist.”

2012 UMC General Conference Petition, as cited by John Meunier at
https://johnmeunier.wordpress.com/2012/02/23/an-eub-laments/

As I’m headed to the Global Methodist Church, I’m leaving the “United.” Which is ironic. From what I can tell, the EUB was more evangelical than the Methodist Church and had distinctly less modernist influence, but now their name has been claimed by the faction that they would have least agreed with! Oh, politics. Either way, popping that word in front of the denominational name didn’t preserve any heritage. We have the opportunity to honor our theological history in more than name; we can actually know it. But it’ll take work! We need to know about more than John Wesley. Yes, I get it, he’s the guy that started the thing. Nobody is downplaying that. But where did Wesley get his much of his theological outlook? Jacob Arminius. Who helped Wesley get Methodism going in the colonies? Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury. Who wrote the famous covenant prayer he adopted? Richard Alleine. Who helped get the Gospel to German-speaking populations in the colonies? A disgraced Mennonite bishop, Martin Boehm, and a Reformed missionary, William Otterbein. And who literally helped spread Methodism among German-speakers when the actual Methodists didn’t allow preaching in German? Jacob Albright.

Of course, we also have a million ecumenical saints going back to the very beginning of Christianity to learn from and celebrate, but it’s worth noting that Global Methodists have some really cool heritage that a lot of us don’t even know about. We lost the name, but let’s not lose the treasures that history has for us.