Tag: Christian theology

Aquinas and Abortion

~ Vincent

Thomas Aquinas’s name gets dropped in quite a few pro-abortion arguments.  Roe v. Wade referenced Aquinas.  President Biden referenced Aquinas.  There’s even a popular undercurrent of pseudo-history you can find around the internet that appeals to Aquinas to portray the Middle Ages as this golden age of abortions where your local herbalist was always at the ready to sell the neighborhood abortion drugs at the drop of a hat.  But why is Aquinas referenced with such regularity?  

Aquinas didn’t believe that a fetus was genuinely human until one to three months after the pregnancy began.

And that’s true!  He didn’t.  We’ll get to why in just a minute.  But the strange thing about all of the Aquinas citations is that the people who reference Aquinas (on both sides of the aisle) don’t seem to know much about him.  They know he’s a famous Christian and philosopher and if they can convince people he’s on their side, boy, that would be a knockout punch in their favor.  But that’s the thing; they’re not curious about what he actually has to say for himself.  They want to explain their own position and drop his name in there when it’s convenient.  When they bother to give any citations, they tend to be from secondary sources (which is so lazy when when the person in question wrote as much as Aquinas did) and even when there are direct citations, his most famous works are usually referenced, rather than the most relevant to the actual topic at hand.  So, I wanted to give Aquinas a fair opportunity to speak on the matter.  What did Aquinas actually believe about abortion? 

It’s a big question, so I’m going to tackle it in three different pieces: Aquinas on the Beginning of Human Life, Aquinas on Sex, and Canon Law in the Day of Aquinas.

And if you’re looking for spoilers, here’s the big picture: working within the bounds of popular science in his day, Thomas did believe that human life starts to be genuinely human between one and three months into a pregnancy (depending on the child’s gender). This qualified early-term abortion as a crime other than murder. That said he still lists it as a crime against nature regardless of when it happens, and he worked within a system where it was legally punishable by law at any stage during the pregnancy. Aquinas’s question wasn’t “Is abortion a crime,” so much as it was, “How serious a crime is abortion at each stage?”

Let’s dig in.

Aquinas on the Origins of Life

If we want to talk about Aquinas and abortion, the first place to go is his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences.  It’s not as well known as his famous Summa Theologica, but it’s the only place where he goes from speaking in abstract terms about human development to a description that’ so concrete that it lists specific timeframes for that development.  The context here is a debate about Jesus’s development during Mary’s pregnancy. When was that little fetus Jesus? Was he the Son of God right from the moment of conception?  Or did he become the Son of God at a certain moment in the pregnancy?  Classic Aristotialian thought held that sperm grew into a person in the incubating space of the womb (indicated in the word’s derivation from the Greek σπέρμα sperma meaning “seed”). That process took 40 days for a male child and 90 days for females.  If you hold to that Aristotlian science (and Aquinas certainly did), you end up with a question: did Jesus have a proto-human phase in which he successively became a human from a sperm?  Or was he just instantaneously there in the womb as a person through the power of the Holy Spirit?  He answers as follows:

[A]ccording to the faith, Christ’s conception must be held to have happened instantaneously, for human nature was not assumed before it was perfected in its species, since its parts were not assumable except by reason of the whole, as is evident from what was said in Distinction 2. … For this reason we must consider that conception to have been instantaneous, so that these things existed in the same instant: the conversion of that material blood into flesh and the other parts of Christ’s body; the formation of the organic members and the soul being infused in the organ-bearing body; and the assumption of the ensouled body into the unity of the divine person.

Now, in others these things occur successively, such that a male child’s conception is not completed until the fortieth day, or a female’s until the ninetieth, as the Philosopher says in History of Animals, [book] 9. But in the completion of the male body Augustine seems to add six days, which are distinguished as follows, according to him in his Letter to Jerome. For the first six days the seed has a likeness resembling milk; in the next nine days it changes to blood; then in twelve days it solidifies; in eighteen days it is formed to the complete lines of the members; and from then on the rest of the time until the time of delivery it grows in size. Thus the verse: Six days as milk, three times three as blood, two times six forms the flesh, three times six the members. However, in Christ’s conception, the matter that the Virgin supplied immediately took the form and figure of the human body, as well as the soul, and was assumed into the unity of the divine person (Commentary on the Sentences, Book 3, Distinction 3, Question 5, Article 2).

You can see him reference some of his previous work (Book 3, Distinction 2, Article 3) in the quote there to try to establish that Jesus Christ was not just the soul, but the body.  In the incarnation, there was a perfect union of God and man, not a material body that developed separately and then a soul that came along after the fact. There had to be a legitimate, full union between the two natures. He admits that for normal humans, the Aristotelian norm of 40 and 90 days before you’re fully human is true, but Christ’s exceptional incarnation led to him just popping into being through the power of the Holy Spirit, rather than developing from a sperm.

All of this science is very strange to us and obviously wrong. He doesn’t even know that eggs exist; only sperm. Even so, you can see how this really clearly gives us the framework to determine when a fetus is a human child. In his words, it’s “ensouled” after the first few weeks. Before that, an organic creature is developing, but it’s not one that’s human just yet.

If we just look at this solitary piece, abortion feels like a pretty rational move for a Christian that’s following in his footsteps, right?  Ah, but we can’t just pluck out his pieces about human development (a proportionally small piece of his works) and ignore the lion’s share of what’s left and declare ourselves to be thinking in his tradition.  Let’s keep going to see why Aquinas actually did not support abortion.

Aquinas on Sex

Now that we know what Aquinas thinks about the development of a fetus, we need to understand what he thinks about the procreative act itself.  On this topic, Aquinas really is absolutely a man of the medieval Chrisitan world.  And what did medieval Christians think about sex?  Well, to them, it was absolutely intertwined with having babies.  You couldn’t rightly separate the sensual aspect from the procreative aspect without stumbling into sin.  Now, obviously I’m not saying that everyone in the middle ages acted according to that worldview and never cheated on their spouse or whatever other thing you can imagine.  Of course they did.  People don’t always live up to the ideals of their society, even if they claim to ascribe to them.  But when it comes to the ideals, doctrines, and philosophy of the time, there can’t be any doubt that any effort to enjoy sex without an openness to procreation was sinful.

And why?  Well, the medieval world, and especially Thomas Aquinas, thought in terms of natural law.They believed the world had a natural sort of logic to it that was built in by God.  As you went about living your life, you were expected to look at each object and each act to consider why it exists.  Why did God make this?  What was his purpose?  Are you acting in a way that’s consistent with the logic of God’s creation?  Or are you twisting things around to serve your own wants, rather than God’s intended purpose?

That’s really abstract, so let’s work through an example.  An obvious one is food.  What is the logic of food?  Food exists to give us nourishment.  The process of eating it might be pleasurable (and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that), but if we’re going to live by the logic of the thing, the process of eating should never be separated from its natural end: we eat to be nourished.  If we start to enjoy it without that end in sight, that’s when we start to sin.  Are you enjoying Doritos because you’re hungry?  That’s great!  Are you enjoying Doritos when you’re already full but you just want to keep munching because they’re delicious?  That’s sin.  You’re losing sight of why God gave us food and just enjoying it out of gluttony.

Now, take that logic and apply it to sex.  Why does sex exist?  To have kids.  That’s the natural, logical end of the process.  If you wanted to have sex righteously, you were expected to look towards the end (babies), rather than just indulging for the pleasure of the process itself.  That was lustful and a misuse of what God gave us.  Not only was this logic very popular throughout the medieval world, but it was very popular with Thomas Aquinas.  As a matter of fact, the argument and examples that I just gave (sans Doritos) are straight out of his magnum opus, Summa Theologica, when he’s rejecting the idea that all “venereal acts” are inherently sinful:

A sin, in human acts, is that which is against the order of reason. Now the order of reason consists in its ordering everything to its end in a fitting manner… Now just as the preservation of the bodily nature of one individual is a true good, so, too, is the preservation of the nature of the human species a very great good. And just as the use of food is directed to the preservation of life in the individual, so is the use of venereal acts directed to the preservation of the whole human race (Question 153, Article 2).

Also, notice that he felt the need to debate whether or not there can be non-sinful sex.  That should tell you something else about the medieval world verses our own!  While we debate, is there any sex that is morally wrong, they were debating whether there was any sex that is morally right!  A very different starting place

This alone helps us shift gears when we’re thinking about Aquinas and abortion.  Aquinas would not have wanted anyone to have sex if they weren’t open to having children.  That would be against the nature of the act and sinful sex, even for a married couple.  Aquinas says as much directly in his Commentary on the Sentences when he addresses one of Peter Lombard’s quotes about birth control:

As for those who procure poisons to induce sterility, they are not marriage partners, but fornicators. (Sent. IV, 31.3 (184). 1.

Although this sin is grave, and to be counted among wicked deeds, and against nature (for even beasts desire offspring), nevertheless it is less grave than murder, since a child conceived could be prevented in another way.  Nor is such a person to be judged irregular, unless he should now procure an abortion for the child about to be born  (Book 4, Distinction 31, Question 2, Article 3).

And in that quote, you can see how he starts to move from birth control to abortion in applying the same logic. We are given food to be nourished.  We are given sex to procreate.  Why is a person made pregnant?  Is it to end the pregnancy?  No.  That would qualify as going against the natural logic of pregnancy in the most direct way possible.  Natural law philosophy was one of Aquinas’s biggest emphases, so if we want to introduce him to conversations about abortion, we have to remember that background first and foremost before we can deal with any of the specifics.

Church Law in the Days of Aquinas

But now that we’ve set the stage on some of Aquinas’s basic convictions as an Aristotilian thinker and a natural law enthusiast, we need to acknowledge the actual law of the medieval church during the era that he was at work.  As famous as he was, he influenced the teachings, and the teachings most definitely influenced him, so what did the church actually hold during the eras in question?  And I do want to acknowledge that this is a really complicated thing to research.  A shocking amount is not readily accessible if you don’t speak Latin.  Luckily, Paul Harrington wrote an excellent summary of laws pertaining to abortion over time in church history in The Linacre Quarterly that makes the depths of medieval church law accessible to anyone. While we have a particular interest in church law during the lifetime of Aquinas (1225-1274), a broader picture of what was going on in the medieval and Roman Catholic church won’t hurt our understanding either.

Looking at church law over time, for a little over a thousand years, the church considered abortion to be legally identical to murder and the standard punishment was usually excommunication.  It’s hard for us to wrap our minds around something like excommunication, since there’s not really an equivalent today. If we get kicked out of our congregation, good riddance! We’ll just go to the church down the street! But if we want to really understand their mindset, it’s crucial to recognize just how serious a punishment like that was in that timeframe.  An excommunicated person was cut off from the church until they had fully repented, meaning they couldn’t go to worship with their family and community.  They couldn’t participate in the sacraments.  They couldn’t get married.  They couldn’t offer prayers for dead relatives.  They couldn’t get buried. And if they died while excommunicated, Hell was the destination.  Excommunication was the most severe punishment you could get from the church.  This was serious.

A little after the turn of the millennium, we do see that distinction between an animated and inanimate fetus make it’s way into law. It first appeared in 1116.  A bishop named Ivo of Chartres first introduced it, and that distinction was taken up by a legal scholar named Gratian and printed in the legal textbook that became the standard for decades moving forward, Decretum.  It continued in Roman Catholic law for 753 years until Pope Pius IX ended that distinction in 1869.  During this period, if you got an abortion outside of the 40 day limit for males or 90 day limit for females, you were a murderer.  If you got an abortion within the limit, you had committed quasi-murder or homicide (the language varied depending on specifics at the time).  As the name implies, the punishments were less severe for quasi-murder.  For example, in 1159, your punishment was 3 years of penance if you aborted an inanimate fetus, verses the 7 years of penance or more that you would receive for aborting an animated fetus (which was the punishment for murder). And that’s just one specific instance. Sometimes, the punishment was a lifetime of excommunication. Sometimes it was left up to regional leaders. You get the idea. The important thing to note is that there was a legal distinction that made one a greater sin and the other a lesser sin. Some of the other abortion-centric laws in this timeframe didn’t acknowledge the distinction. For example, a piece of legislation by Regino of Prum in 1211 introduced a law that anyone caught selling drugs to induce abortion (at any stage of development) was guilty of murder. On the whole though, the distinction stands (for those who are curious, the distinction never really seems to have made a meaningful appearance in the Protestant world).

Notice that Aquinas’s position was the dominant position of the church during this time.  Abortion was always sinful.  The distinction in church law was never used to imply otherwise.  The distinction came up because people wanted to know how severe the sin of abortion was. Was it murder? Was it quasi-murder? Was it grave sin? Is it a lifetime excommunication or a period of penance? What punishment fits the crime?

Conclusion

Whew!  That’s a lot to take in.  Honestly, every time I learned more about this topic, it genuinely pushed me to deeper levels of understanding.  It was wild to see how recent our modern understanding of biology is, how church law was enacted in different eras, and how philosophy and theology have influenced one another in so many different ways.  I didn’t come to this question knowing the answer.  I came because I wanted to see firsthand what the truth was, and after some sifting around, I found more of it than I started with.  And I got to rediscover that history is so weird!  People in different times had such different ideas that are hard to wrap our minds around.

Nevertheless, at the end of it all, I have to wonder whether pro-abortion appeals to Aquinas are a product of ignorance or if they’re knowingly made in bad faith.  The solitary point of agreement is that he did not think human life began instantaneously after sex.  After that point, it’s all downhill.  In spite of that agreement, he did agree to a relatively early date where the child was fully human.  He considered abortion a crime against nature at best and murder at worst (depending on the timing).  He upheld and helped to shape a system of philosophy and canon of law that literally included it as a punishable offense.  Is this really the best person to appeal to?

As humans, we have the unique privilege of looking at this world around us and trying to figure it all out.  That’s wild!  We get to learn and read and try our best to come to knowledge of the truth.  A basic part of wielding that privilege well is acknowledging when we disagree with others and why we do.  When we misrepresent the legacy of others to make our ideas more palatable to those who would otherwise disagree, we’re participating in a lie, and the truth is never uncovered by lying.

Other great recommendations for those who want more:
Summa Theologica Ch. 118
Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 2, Ch. 65 and up
Abortion: Part VIII, Paul V. Harrington
A Great Free Translation of All Things Aquinas by the Aquinas Institute

Christian Perfection and the King James Bible

~ Vincent

If you’re not in a church with Wesleyan heritage, you probably don’t know what Christian perfection is. Heck, even if you’re in a church with Wesleyan heritage, there’s a solid chance you haven’t heard about this particular doctrine. It’s not hard to see why. The name is pretty bad. Yes, fellow Wesleyan people, I said bad. Try to hang with me for a second. “Perfect” isn’t something most people see as either achievable or desirable in our era. Folk wisdom tells us that “nobody’s perfect.” Movies feature villains that want perfection in this world and are willing to fight, hurt, or kill people to find it (“The Lego Movie” and “Kubo and the Two Strings” both come to mind). Self-help books of all shades encourage us to accept the imperfections in this world, rather than lose our mind seeking perfection. Even a lot of contemporary church language is caught up in appreciating our “brokenness,” rather than hating ourselves for falling short. In the eyes of the average person, any doctrine including the word “perfection” is scary from the start.

To be fair, it’s pretty clear that Christian perfection was a controversial doctrine from its inception. When John Wesley (the founder of Methodism) started talking about it, a lot of his friends disagreed with it. His ministry partner and brother, Charles, seems to have had a different idea of what it was and how to achieve it. Even Wesley’s exhaustive explanation of the doctrine, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, is a real challenge by anyone’s definition. It is a composite work that includes personal reflections, hymns, minutes from a conference that he attended, bits from sermons that he preached, journal entries from a person that he thinks may have achieved Christian perfection (right before they died), and arguments against people who claimed to have achieved Christian perfection that he didn’t think managed it (the most notable examples being Thomas Maxfield and George Bell). John went through seven different revisions of this booklet across his life as he added more and more content. It’s kinda like a scrapbook of his doctrine and how he’s come to understand it across his lifetime.

So, yeah, we’re dealing with something that’s challenging and difficult to articulate. To briefly summarize the doctrine, Wesley believed that, through the Holy Spirit, a mature Christian could reach a state where they would avoid willfully sinning. That was Christian perfection. These Christians could still sin through ignorance, mistake, or error, since their bodies and minds were still very much in this world, but their hearts would be so mature in the faith that God’s love would reside in them. THAT’S the core of the idea. If you want to know more about it in John’s words, I recommend his sermon “On Perfection” from the year 1740. It’s much more readable than Plain Account. If you don’t want to read more but think my explanation is way too generous for such a wildly-named doctrine, John’s words from one of his letters put it into words that suit modern people a little more readily:

Perfection is only another term for holiness, or the image of God in man

John Wesley (Letter to Rev. Mr. Dodd, The Works of John Wesley, 11:450-451)

Rather than argue about whether or not this particular doctrine is good or bad, I’d like to share a little revelation about why it takes the form that it does. I’ve always wondered, “Why did John choose that particular name? I mean, if the word “holiness” or “sanctification” accomplish the same thing, why not use one of them? That would have gone a long way with some of his detractors!” Well, reading through some of the sermons of Count Zinzendorf recently (a Wesley friend that, like many Wesley friends, had a falling out with John before the end of his life), and he cited Philippians 3:15 regarding a desire for Christians to become perfect. You can imagine my puzzlement. I flipped open my NIV Bible and checked the verse: “All of us, then, who are mature should take such a view of things. And if on some point you think differently, that too God will make clear to you.” Okay? What was Zinzendorf talking about? Was I reading a bad translation of his sermons? And then I realized that the NIV is hundreds of years away from the translations that were being used in the 1700s. Of course it doesn’t sound the same; it wasn’t what they were reading. I popped open what would have been more normative for the time, the KJV, and lo and behold: “Let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded: and if in any thing ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you.” There was a “perfect” there historically that was translated differently today!

By no means do I think that’s a bad thing. Language changes, and translations change to keep up with the way that we speak. It looks like the Greek word, teleioi, is translated in different instances as either perfect, mature, or fully grown. But think about that! The fact that the New Testament has 7 instances of that word that all moved from “perfect” to something else over time is wild! And that’s not the only word that was translated away from “perfect” to something else. The KJV has the word “perfect” in it 129 times, versus the NIV’s 45 times. That’s almost three times the number of perfects! Now, obviously you’re going to have a different number of “perfects” depending on your Bible translation (NRSV- 41, NLT- 47, CSB- 32, ESV- 94), but with very few exceptions, most of us see the word “perfect” in our Bibles far less than 18th century Christians like John Wesley would have.

As a side note, I totally acknowledge that even though I stumbled onto this little tidbit while reading Count Zinzendorf, he was a German speaker and wouldn’t have regularly engaged the KJV. I’m woefully under-equipped to manage wading through historic German Bibles to get that primary source verification, but I’m going to assume that the translator of Zinzendorf’s sermons was accurate, which would mean that even German translations from the 18th century were more likely to use words like “perfect” than their modern equivalents are.

Why did John Wesley stick with the name “Christian perfection?” Well, he says in his Plain Account, “There is such a thing as perfection; for it is again and again mentioned in Scripture.” To modern readers, that’s a pretty hollow claim. There’s a couple well-known verses that reference perfection, but it’s usually referencing God, not people. Why would Wesley stake his whole idea on a word that doesn’t appear in the Bible as much as he acts like it does? Because in the translation that he was familiar with, it DID come up again and again. He saw the epistles as packed with references to Christian perfection! Language changes and Bible translators adapt, but it was a joy to see why a doctrine with such an inflammatory name got it’s name.

Come, Holy Spirit by Ambrose (Modernized)

~ Vincent

I’ve written previously about how old hymns are cool and it’s a shame more people don’t get the chance to sing them. One of the biggest barriers to enjoying these old hymns is their tune. No matter how theologically rich the lyrics might be and how cool the historical circumstances were, people aren’t going to enjoy a hymn if they don’t know how to sing it. I say this as someone who has been on both sides of the problem. I’ve pulled the most amazing worship music out of the dark corners of the world to share with my congregation and watched as they’ve sadly muddled through the thing, wondering why I picked something so weird. I’ve also been in the pews, desperately trying to figure out how on earth this weirdo song we’re singing this morning goes, wishing they’d have just stuck with “Amazing Grace.” New songs are hard, and new songs that are off the beaten path are even harder still. If we’re going to reintroduce some forgotten classics, we need a way to make them a little more familiar.

Back in the early days of hymnals, this wasn’t a problem. Hymnals were basically a book of poems with recommended tunes. In worship, you matched up a good tune to a good poem and BOOM! You had a hymn. So why not do that today?

This Pentecost, I reworked Ambrose’s classic hymn “Come, Holy Spirit” (Nunc Sancte nobis Spiritus) to the tune of “My Hope is Built on Nothing Less” (aka “Solid Rock”) and it was shockingly natural. I did have to tweak it in parts, add a line, and make a chorus, but I was delighted with how well it went on Sunday. For anyone looking for an ancient hymn that’s singable for Christians today, here you go!

come-holy-spirit-melodyDownload
come-holy-spirit-fullDownload

The Prosperity Gospel

~ Vincent

In worship, I’ve been preaching through John 6. In overview, Jesus makes bread for hungry people, the people get excited, the people chase Jesus down for more miracle bread, Jesus says he’s the bread of life and all they really need, and finally people get disappointed and leave. Here’s a crowd of people that legitimately witness a miracle, but instead of bowing down before Jesus, they want to put him to work. They don’t really want the bread of life; they want a life of bread.

Naturally, I started thinking about people that have that sense of religiosity today. There are plenty of popular speakers who claim that God wants to lead you to a life of bread. The prosperity gospel preachers are the most obvious example. I didn’t want to misrepresent them when talking about them, so I started digging through some of the their writings to get a sense for the kinds of things they say and believe. Let me tell you, it was a wild ride. Not only was it broadly ickier than I expected (you’ll see), but there were a lot of little dots I got the chance to connect.

Prosperity gospel preachers are overwhelmingly nondenominational. They’re also well represented by people of every race. Neither of these first two items surprised me. I can’t imagine most of these pastors being open to denominational oversight, and no race is immune from the temptation of money. What did catch me off guard was the religious background that most of these preachers had. There’s a surprisingly strong tie between prosperity gospel preaching and the Charismatic/Pentecostal tradition. Not every prosperity gospel preacher has a Pentecostal background, but the modern American prosperity gospel did get its start there (Oral Roberts tends to be the usual starting place for religious historians), and it still has really, really strong ties to it today. As a non-Pentecostal/Charismatic looking at their tradition from the outside, the connection seems pretty logical when I think about it. Charismatics often put a really high premium on miracles in a Christian’s life today. It’s not wild to assume that you can get to, “God wants to give me money if I have enough faith,” pretty quickly from there if you go off the rails. Pentecostalism also lacks the clear denominational structures that can prevent obvious false teachings from reaching the pulpit, and it tends to have a really low emphasis on (and even active skepticism about) education. I didn’t expect the connection between those two entities, but it makes good sense.

History aside, I was shocked at how shameless prosperity gospel preachers can be. Legitimately, wholeheartedly, shameless. Here are some quotes that just broke my heart:

  • “Sow a seed on your MasterCard, your Visa or your American Express, and then when you do, expect God to open the windows of heaven and pour you out a blessing.” -Oral Roberts (“Success in Life” broadcast on the Trinity Broadcasting Network September 21, 1990)
  • “The best thing you can do for the poor is not become one of them.” -Rev. Ike (“The Gospel According to Rev. Ike,” Ebony Magazine, Dec. 1976)
  • “Don’t wait for the pie in the sky by-and-by when you die. Get yours now with ice cream and a cherry on top!” -Rev. Ike (“The Gospel According to Rev. Ike,” Ebony Magazine, Dec. 1976)
  • “If you’ve got one-dollar faith and you ask for a ten-thousand dollar item, it ain’t going to work.  It won’t work!  Jesus said, ‘according to your [faith,]’ not according to God’s will for you, in His own good time, if it’s according to His will, if He can work it into his busy schedule.  He said, ‘According to your faith, be it unto you.’  Now, I may want a Rolls Royce, and don’t have but bicycle faith.  Guess what I’m going to get?  A bicycle.” -Rev. Frederick Price (Fredrick K. C. Price. “Praise The Lord” broadcast on TBN. 21 Sept. 1990)
  • “God works by faith. You must believe first, and then you’ll receive” -Joel Osteen (Your Best Life Now, p. 33)
  • “You will often receive preferential treatment simply because your Father is the King of kings, and His glory and honor spill over onto you” -Joel Osteen (Your Best Life Now, p.40)
  • “Remember, only what you give can God multiply back. If you give nothing, and even if God were to multiply it, it would still be nothing!” -Oral Roberts (The Miracle of Seed-Faith, p.27)

And my personal favorite, when Oral Roberts told all of his followers that he was going to die unless they sent him eight million dollars. There are a million newspaper articles about it, but that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted something more incriminating. I wanted to read about the incident in his own words. I didn’t have to look far. He literally wrote about it in his own autobiography:

  • “The Lord spoke to me near the end of 1986 and said, ‘I told you to raise $8 million to carry on My medical work. You have from January 1 to March 31 to get it done. If you don’t then your work is finished, and I am going to call you home.'” -Oral Roberts (Expect a Miracle: My Life and Ministry, p.289)

Yikes.

You read quotes like this and can’t help but feel angry. When the anger subsides, you worry about the people that they’re taking advantage of. Sure, some of them might be able to afford a donation here and there to support a charismatic speaker, but what about the people who are desperate? What about the woman who has cancer, trying to juggle her medical bills, sending “Rolls Royce faith” checks in the hope that thing will turn around? What about the poor man with brain damage who sends in any little bit of cash that he can in the hopes that God will miraculously restore him? I believe in miracles and tithing as much as the next pastor, but I’ve known people in these circumstances, and I’ve seen the damage that prosperity gospel preachers can cause. Here is a pack of wolves on the prowl for desperate, down-on-their-luck people. Not everyone has the gift of discernment, and they’re counting on that. It reminded me of another certain historical preacher that assured people that God would give them blessings if they forked over some cash:

You should know that all who confess and in penance put alms into the coffer according to the counsel of the confessor, will obtain complete remission of all their sins…. Why are you then standing there? Run for the salvation of your souls! Be as careful and concerned for the salvation of your souls as you are for your temporal goods, which you seek both day and night…

Don’t you hear the voices of your wailing dead parents and others who say, ‘Have mercy upon me, have mercy upon me, because we are in severe punishment and pain. From this you could redeem us with a 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 have 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?

-Johann Tetzel , Sermon on Indulgences

Where’s a Martin Luther when you need him?

The Empty Tomb and Charlton Heston

~ Vincent
“Are you a master builder or a master butcher?”

I love watching The Ten Commandments around this time of the year. You know, the one with Charleton Heston in it?  They had that movie on TV every year during Easter weekend when I was growing up, so we’d munch down on some jellybeans and enjoy.  Not all of it, of course.  That would have been absurd.  The movie is well over three hours long (not counting the commercials) and I was a kid.  If I was lucky, I managed to get as far as the Nile turning to blood before I got distracted by something else.  Mind you, there were a few marathons of endurance when I managed to make it through the entire thing (usually, by recording it and playing it back over the next few days), but usually I only got bits and pieces every year.  Needless to say, the Passover story just feels right for me to think about whenever Easter comes around.  Which is pretty weird since I’m not Jewish.

I’m not the first Christian to associate leaving Egypt with Easter.  Cyril of Jerusalem, a bishop in the 4th century, thought in those same terms.  I’ve been reading through some of his stuff lately because I’m leading a confirmation class, and Cyril’s catechetical lectures are some of the most famous confirmation materials in history.  In them, he covers the basics of Christianity for people who were hoping to be baptized, so there’s a lot about the Church, the sacraments, and why we need Jesus so much.  And in 4th century Jerusalem, you got baptized on Easter, so every class led up to that big day.  Afterwards, there were a few more bonus classes where Cyril taught the newly-baptized Christians from the mouth of the very tomb where Jesus was buried.  Can you imagine being present for that?  Even reading about it all these years later is exciting!

The first sermon that Cyril gave from the mouth of the tomb, was about… the exodus from Egypt!  Well, and baptism.  And Jesus.  All of that rolled into one.  Here it is in some of his words:

Let’s turn from the old to the new, from the figure to the reality.  There, we have Moses sent by God to Egypt; here, Christ was sent by his Father into the world.  There, Moses came to lead oppressed people out of Egypt; here, Jesus came to rescue people oppressed in the world by sin.  There, the blood of a lamb warded off the destroyer; here, the blood of the Lamb without blemish, Jesus Christ, wards off every demon.  There, a tyrant pursued the Isarelites all the way to the sea; here, the author of evil followed you even to the streams of salvation.  The tyrant of old was drowned in the sea, and the one today vanishes in the waters of salvation.

-Cyril of Jerusalem, First Lecture on the Mysteries (trans. Gifford 1894, paraphrased by me)

To Cyril, the Bible wasn’t this chaotic mess of stories all jumbling around.  Everything was deeply connected, and it was all intended to help us.  So when we read the Passover story, we should take note of details.  We should notice who the people are and what they’re up against.  We should notice where their salvation is from and how they are saved!  We should take note of every little detail.  Why?  Because it’s not just about a group of people thousands of years ago.  It’s about you and me, it’s about God, and it’s about how he saved us.  He acted in the past in certain ways to prepare us for what was coming in Jesus: the fullness of salvation for all people.

I have no idea what you’ve got in store this Easter season.  Whether you’re sitting through the full three hour and forty-five minute epic that is The Ten Commandments, or something way less exciting, just remember that it’s not a bad time of the year to think about the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt.  That story, with all of its drama and excitement, isn’t so far from our situation.  Just as the Israelites were saved by the blood of a lamb all those years ago, we are saved by the blood of the perfect lamb today.

Discipleship in a Postmodern World

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached on December 4, 2022
Scriptures: John 18:28-40, 2 Timothy 4:1-8

Haven’t you heard of that madman who in the bright morning, lit a lantern and ran around the marketplace crying incessantly: “I’m looking for God!  I’m looking for God!”  Since many of those who did not believe in God were standing around together just then, he caused a great laughter.  “Has God been lost, then?”  Asked one.  “Did he lose his way like a child?”  asked another.  “Or is he hiding?’  “Is he afraid of us?”  “Has he gone to sea?”  “Emigrated?”  Thus they shouted and laughed, one interrupting the other.  The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes.  “Where is God?”  he cried.  “I’ll tell you!  We have killed him- you and I!  We are his murderers.  But what does it mean?  … Is there still an up and a down?  Are we now straying through an infinite nothing? … God is dead.  God remains dead.  And we have killed him!… Do we not ourselves have to become God merely to appear worthy of it?”… Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners: they too were silent and looked at him disconcertedly.  Finally, he threw his lantern on the ground so that it broke into pieces and he left.  “I come too early,” he then said, “My time is not yet… This deed is still more remote to them than the remotest stars and yet they have done it themselves!”  It is still remembered how on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and started singing a requiem.  Led out and called to account, he is said to have replied nothing but “What then are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”

That little parable was written by the great philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.  I’m sure you’ve heard the quippiest line from it, “God is dead.”  It’s often used by amateurish atheists trying to argue that God isn’t real.  “God’s dead! Science has disproved him!”  Not true.  And not what Nietzsche was interested in saying.  Nietzsche isn’t trying to make some big clever atheist point.  No, in its original context, Nietzsche isn’t celebrating.  He’s lamenting.  God is conceptually dead to the world around him!  Nobody believes that he’s there.  Our way of thinking no longer includes that particular dogma.  We assume that God doesn’t act and probably isn’t capable of changing the world.  People act!  People change the world.   We vote and we invent and we work and we plan.  The idea that a God is genuinely represented in that process seems absurd to most!  If there is a God, he’s certainly not imagined to be the sort of God that can do things.  He exists in a little irrelevant box at best.  At worst, that box is his coffin.  As far as popular imagination goes, God is conceptually dead.  And what does that mean? 

If we don’t believe in God anymore, nothing can be the same as it was when we did.   Everything has to be different.  Is there still an up and a down?  Is there still a right and a wrong?  Can there be real meaning in the world?  Or are we all just floating in an infinite nothing, trying desperately to create meaning where there is none?  If God is dead, we are still here, we still crave some kind of point.  If God is dead, we need to become Gods to fill the void in the cosmos that we created.

In the end of his little parable, the madman (clearly a stand-in for Nietzsche) wanders away.  The crowd isn’t ready for him yet.  They want to pretend that everything is still the same.  That up is objectively up and down is objectively down.  That there’s an objective point and that things can politely go on as they have been.  But the madman knows better.  Nothing is objective anymore.  People just aren’t willing to admit it just yet.  And that’s a summation of Nietzsche’s philosophy.   Nietzsche’s whole idea was that if Westerners no longer believe in God, they need to start being honest with themselves.  There can be no appeals to absolutes.  There can be no pleasant, safe reliance on old social structures that were built with the assumption that a god existed and wanted certain things for us.  If we don’t believe in God, we need to tear down the old structure and build fresh.  Because the rules that we are playing by are absurd.

The future Nietzsche foretold is now.  The postmodern era is here.  There are no absolutes.  There is no objectivity…  no singular way of being.  We have each become as God, creating our own meaning, crafting our own laws, and living free from the commands of others.

And what has become of churches in this world?  If Nietzsche is to be believed, they’re tombs and sepulchers.  Evidence of something that’s gone.  Memorials for a lost era.  They exist so people can look backwards at what once was for those that wish to reminisce.

That’s not far off.

Eight weeks ago, we went through the statistics of not only United Methodist decline, but also Christian decline in the Western world.   I think they bear repeating.  In the early 1990s, around 90 percent of American adults identified as Christian.  In 2007, the number was down to 78% (a twelve percent loss).  In 2020, that number was 64% (a further 14 percent loss).  And that’s just the amount of people that are willing to tick the “Christian” box on a survey!  The number of devout Christians is much lower than that.

And there’s the fact that the average number of new United Methodists in the United States each year is about -200,000.  And there’s the fact that a person going into undergraduate studies as a confessing Christian only has between an 18 and a 30 percent chance of leaving that same campus as a confessing Christian.  Things are declining.  And on top of all of those sobering statistics, we saw the pandemic.  Some experts are saying that it sped things up by about ten years.  The decline that was happening slowly in our churches happened quickly.  Churches that looked like they were just one good pastor away from recovery can’t pretend anymore.  And the United States is one of the most religious countries in the Western world.  Don’t even start with Europe. 

If we’re going to be a church in the West, we have to acknowledge that we no longer live in a culture that creates Christians by default.  We live in a culture that is statistically proven to convert people away from Christianity.

Ever since I got here, you guys said you wanted to grow.  And that’s what every church says, right?  Well, most of ‘em anyway.  They say they want to grow.  If we want to share the Gospel with people around us, we can’t bury our heads in the sand as to these facts.  We’re past the time when most of the population is actively looking for a church to attend.  There are still cultural conservatives (people that look back and see something of value, even when others are moving away from it).  Which is brilliant!  That instinct will lead them to the most valuable truth there is.  But most people aren’t like that.  Most aren’t looking for churches, nor are they interested in what we’re doing.  Making disciples right now is the most difficult it’s been in over a thousand years.   Because for the very first time in Western History, we’re trying to share the Gospel with people who think they know it and think it doesn’t hold up.  They think that God is dead.

If you’re discouraged right now, don’t be.  Legitimately.  The downside of sermons like these is they sound so horrendously dire.  Gloom and doom and sadness all around.  There’s no point in that.  Here’s the good news:  God is real.  He doesn’t require our approval to exist.  He simply exists!  And he’s in control!  And we’re never alone or abandoned.  He has called us, you and me, to be missionaries to the Western world at the dawn of a new era.  We have been chosen by God for a remarkable task!  No need to feel upset.

We aren’t doing this to sit around and feel miserable.  We’re asking a question.  How?  How can we share the Gospel with a world that thinks God is dead.  How can we share the greatest news there ever was with a new generation?  

Evangelism today won’t look the same.  The status quo will not hold.  We can’t just wait for people to come to us and expect that with the right preacher at the helm, the right extra-fun event, and the right decor, people will come flocking.  They won’t.  A lot of them don’t even know we exist.  They’re not looking for events from us.  They’re not even thinking about us.  We have to go looking for them!  We’re missionaries in a new world, and we have to go to the people.  We have to know them.  To know what they love.  What they fear.  What they long for.  What concerns them.  We have to know the culture.  And once we do, that’s when we can start to meaningfully consider how we can share the Gospel.

So what did we learn over the past eight weeks?  What are the themes that emerged?  What do I hope we walked away with?

Well, I want to start with a Scripture.  If there’s one Scripture that reflects the post-modern person, I think it’s our first reading about Pontius Pilate, John 18:28-40.  Here is a man that is face to face with Jesus himself… and what does he say?  “What is truth?”  What is truth?  Pilate is a big, bad Roman governor.  He’s heard a thousand people tell him what’s “true.”  And he’s done bothering with all that.  There’s one truth: power.  The Roman Empire has sent him to govern this territory.  Fact.  The people of the territory are angry at Jesus for having the audacity to tell them that he’s God.  Fact.  They demand his execution.  Fact.   And now?  Now Pilate has to act.  Don’t bother talking to him about truth.

And here’s Jesus.  Weak.  Captured.  Assailed by enemies at every turn.  And he makes his claim once more.  “I’m God.”  And he does make that claim.  How else could you possibly read verse 36?  I have a kingdom but it’s not of this world.  Hmmm, so he is a king and has a kingdom, but it isn’t here.  I wonder where it is…  And yet he’s always clever enough to never quite say something that could get him killed.  Did I say I was a king?  I never used those words.  YOU used those words.  I was someone who was born to testify to the truth.  Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.

And then the words of Pilate.  “What is truth?”  Pilate is world-weary. To him, there is no truth in this world outside what we make of it.

That’s the postmodern world.  There is no truth in this world outside of what we make of it.

In our time on this theme, we’ve thought specifically about five big ideas that cause controversy.  Five doctrines that the post-modern world holds that our doctrines prevent us from agreeing with.

1. There is no objective truth.
2. The authentic self is inherently good. Society is inherently evil.
3. The only legitimate authority over a person is themselves.
4. The world is defined by power.
5. Happiness is the goal all living things should strive for.

First, we spoke about absolute truth.  Just like Pilate, we live in a world where people assume that talk about truth is ridiculous.  There is no objective truth.  We each have our own truth, our own separate way of being, our own assumptions, but our truth isn’t actually true for other people.  That would be absurd.  What is truth?  An unwillingness to consider truth as objective is a challenge to Christianity because Jesus never claimed to just be a subjective truth; a great option for those interested.  He claimed to be THE WAY.  The singular, objective truth in a world that is swimming with confusion.

Then we spoke about the second doctrine: authenticity.  Augustine and Jean Jacques Rousseau and their dueling stories of produce theft.  Why do people do bad things?  Is there something in us?  Or do the real factors lie outside of us?  The dominant philosophical forces tend to assume that wrong lies outside of ourselves.  That’s why it’s so easy to rail against society and so hard to talk about sins that we ourselves are actively fighting.  Another hurdle for people today.  Because believing in Christianity sounds like moving to a very positive way of thinking (I am inherently good) to a very negative way of thinking (I need help to be good).

Next, we talked about authority.  We looked at poetry and art and other mediums that reflect that great question: where does authority lie?  In an author?  In a work?  Or in an audience?  Postmodernism assumes there is no author that matters and the work is what you make of it!  The audience (us) holds all the real authority.  But it’s hard to live when you’re the one making up everything as you go along.  Because you know you made it up!  And there’s a suspicion that it was entirely arbitrary.  This is a sticking point where Christianity has some power over postmodernism.  Because we aren’t just making up meaning;  we’ve got it!

We spoke about power.  The world has become so cynical.  In our stories, we see self-interested characters doing whatever it takes to gain power.  And that’s what history has started to look like: just a bunch of jerks trying to get power over one another.  Our trust in any governing entity is just rock bottom, and not just because of particulars, but because it’s hard to believe that anyone is trying to lead for anything more than money.  Christianity presents, what I believe is a more compelling option.  The Bible says there’s more at work in the world than selfishness.  There’s hope, joy, and love.  Things aren’t as grim as they seem.  Things are more complicated than that.

Finally, we talked about suffering.  Since the post-modern world has no objective meaning, there’s no real reason to suffer.  You’re in charge of your own destiny, so aim to get as much pleasure as possible.  Seek pleasure.  Avoid pain.  Enjoy happiness.  Which makes all this suffering in the world hard to account for.  Because what does pain have to do with existing?  It’s just a meaningless frustration that humanity should have solved by now.  Christianity has always held that suffering is not all bad.  It’s not pleasant, but it’s not evil in and of itself.  Sometimes, we grow through difficult situations.  Because our lives aren’t just intended to make us happy.  They’re intended to make us holy.  And becoming holy can’t happen if everything is smooth.  We are challenged to smooth out those rough edges keeping us from listening to God.

That’s the past few months in a nutshell.  The world around us is different than us.  It has new assumptions that influence not only the way non-Christians look at us, but the way we look at ourselves.  If we’re going to be missionaries to the postmodern world, we have a lot to think about.

So what’s something to end on?  What’s a big takeaway that represents kind of an amalgamation of all we’ve learned?   I’ve been thinking about that all week.  I’ve been reading book after book of the Bible, looking for a Scripture that speaks to how we should hold ourselves.  And the more I looked, the more I was drawn to some of the last words of one of the greatest evangelists in all of history: the Apostle Paul.  And why?  Because here was a man that evangelized from some of the earliest days of the faith.  He traveled from town to town, trying to share the Gospel with people that weren’t actively looking for it just yet.  The passage we have today is from the last verse of the last letter he wrote.  Paul was in a prison cell in Rome awaiting his execution when he wrote this letter to the evangelist Timothy.  So these are his last words.  The last words from one masterful evangelist to another.  And here’s what Paul has to say in 2 Timothy 4:1-8:

In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge:Preach the word; 

If you want to see people become Chrsitian, you have to tell people!  We don’t get to just politely show up on Sunday and then wonder, “Gee, why is it nobody is coming?  Is the sign not big enough?  I’ll go measure the sign.  Are we not having enough fun activities?  Let’s arrange for a few more of those.  Do we need some t-shirts with our logo that we can wear in public?  That’ll turn things around!

By no means are any of those bad things,right?  They’re good!  But in a world where people don’t think that God exists, nobody is going to start attending church because they saw a great sign, they attended a fun event, or saw us wearing a t-shirt with our logo on it.  Nope.  They know that churches exist!  There’s dozens of them littering the landscape.  They know we’re here.  They’re not gonna start believing in God because they saw a great sign.  They need someone to talk to them.  To actually explain to them why Christianity than they think it is.  Why it’s not just a relic of the past or a hand-me-down from a more primitive age; it’s the truth at the center of every life.

be prepared in season and out of season;

Have you ever had a moment where you thought to yourself, “Man, I could have witnessed back there, but I wasn’t sure that I could handle it.”  Sometimes that happens!  We’re talking to someone and it starts to get deep.  And we know that there’s room to start talking about Jesus.  But we’re scared.  What if we say it wrong?  What if they aren’t open to it?  What if they get mad at us?  What if we’re not good enough.

And you know, I’d like to say that in that moment, the Holy Spirit will take over and you’ll be shockingly eloquent and your speech will supernaturally start to be more than you were capable of on your own.  I’d like to say that… but I won’t.  Because even though miracles can happen, it’s best for that not to be plan A.  If we want to share our faith, we have to be prepared.  Be prepared to talk about it!  Be ready to answer questions.  Be ready to say why it makes a difference and answer questions that people have!  And you might think, “Oh, not me.  I’m not good at that sort of thing.”  That’s nonsense.  You are uniquely gifted with a perspective that no one else has.  You have relationships that no one else has.  You have a personality that no one else has.  You have a story that no one else has.  You are uniquely equipped to talk to people about Jesus in a way that no one else can.  So practice.  Talk about Jesus to other Christians.  Talk about Jesus to your family.  Talk about your faith so when the time comes to witness, you’ll be prepared regardless of whether it’s a moment you expected or a moment you didn’t expect.

correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction.

Here, the Bible is showing us that this is about more than theory.  Nobody is asking you to talk at length about abstract philosophy.  There’s nothing wrong with philosophy when it’s addressing real needs that we have, but real life is not abstract.  It’s real.  It’s earthy.  It’s urgent.  When we share the Gospel with people, we need to do more than just tell people, “Well, you know, I think it’s quite viable that a God could exist.  Let me give you my list of proofs.”  That might be good, depending on the person, but it’s hard to work a theory that there might be a God into everyday conversation organically.

No, we share the truth of a God that we KNOW.  A God that we can talk to.  A God we have a relationship with.  A God that helps guide our lives towards what’s good for us and leads us away from those things that would harm us.  This isn’t about abstract theory.  This is about everyday living.  It’s about the choices that we make every second of every day to move towards truth or to move away from it.  To become the people that God is calling us to be, or to walk on paths that we’re not made to walk.  Paul mentions correcting, rebuking, encouraging, and patience because this is a lived faith, not a theory.

For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.

This is a theme that came up repeatedly that I didn’t expect: the fight between the hard work of believing God’s truth, and the comfortable work of accepting a convenient lie.  Repeatedly, the Bible has told us, “Watch out!  You’re gonna be tempted to make up easier stuff.  Don’t do it.  It’s not the way to go.”  Now Paul refers to a particular time in which sound doctrine will be unacceptable to people.  They don’t want anything to do with it.  They’d rather make up their own thing than believe what God says.

If you look through Chrsitian history, in every era people have wondered, is this that time that Paul was talking about?  Is THIS the era in which people will not put up with sound doctrine?  I’m not comfortable making that claim.  I mean, to even make it assumes that things in the West are what God is really focusing on and, as we’ve said before, Christianity is growing in Asia, South America, Africa, and other regions.  Just because some of us might feel like things are bad in our area doesn’t mean it’s not different in other places.  There are Chinese people on the other side of the world where church numbers are swelling thinking to themselves, “Finally, an era where people crave the truth!  Praise God!”  It’s always hard to know if this is THE TIME, given the limitations of our own perspective.

But it’s not new to assume that the time might be now.   I think that speaks to the reality that whether or not a specific, ultimate instance of that time has come, people naturally have a hard time accepting truth.  In our sin, it’s much easier to accept a pleasant lie rather than an uncomfortable truth.

People might not want to hear the tough truths that God is telling.  Sometimes WE don’t want to hear the hard truths that God is telling us.  Because truth is hard to swallow.  Life is hard enough.  Usually, we just want a pat on the back. But we were not born so that we could limp through life and get a pat on the back.  We were born for more than that.

So is this THE time that Paul was talking about?  Or is this just A time like any other?  I don’t know.  I only know that we can’t go around sharing God’s truth with people and expecting that they’re gonna be thrilled right off the bat!  We have to be gentle.  Patient.  Kind.  Understanding.  Because truth can be hard to hear.  It’s tempting to look for people who just tell us what we want to hear.  It’s hard to listen to the truth.  So we need to listen, even when it’s hard.  And we need to be kind and patient when we share with others.  Endure.  Do the work of an evangelist.

For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time for my departure is near.  I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.  Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.

Paul knows that his time is almost up.  He’s in prison.  He’s going to die.  Throughout his epistles, he compares the Christian life to running a race.  Here, he says that he has run the race.  The end is here for him.  And is he afraid?  Afraid that he didn’t do enough?  Afraid that all the churches he planted are gonna die now that he’s not there?  Afraid that he went too far in his preaching and should have chilled out a little so he could stick around?  No!  He didn’t do all of this evangelizing because he wanted to build a bigger church and get famous.  He did it because he loves God.  God commanded him to share and so he did!  There was no fear.  Because now, as things come to a close for him, there is only joy.  Joy for what lies ahead.  Joy for union with his creator.  Joy for himself and for all others that love Jesus.  The crown of righteousness lies ahead.   The life of an evangelist shouldn’t be defined by fear of how things are going to go or what others are going to say.  It’s defined by joy.  It’s defined by peace!  It’s defined by faith. 

As we come to the end of this series, here’s the post-pandemic truth: every church in America has to wake up to the fact that we have reached a fork in the road.  There are two paths ahead of us.  We have to pick one and move.  Because we can’t keep going like we were.  There’s no path at all in that direction.

The status quo isn’t a real option at this point.  Don’t get me wrong; we can keep the status quo as far as church goes.  We can change nothing.  We can even reset everything back to the way it was in the 90s, back when 90 percent of people were confessing Christians and things were easier.  We can do that.  We won’t make any new disciples, mind youm because we don’t live back then anymore.  We live now.  Looking backwards will feel good, but it will  be a huge waste of time.  Nostalgia is a heck of a drug.  It’ll make you feel better.  But it won’t change anything.

There’s two real options for those that want to build churches: The Path of Pilate.  And the Path of Paul.

The first option is the Pilate option.  We can recognize that we have enjoyed a certain level of power in Western society for thousands of years.  Our doctrines naturally made sense to people.  Our ways seemed intuitive.  Christianity was woven into the fabric of society, and that kept our churches full and the number of disciples high.  But Nietzsche is right.  We’re in a new world now, and our logic is no longer intuitive.  If we want to continue existing as a powerful, respectable, comfortable institution, we’ll need to make some trade offs.  We’ll need to adjust our doctrines to align with the world as it is today.  It’d align with the intellectual authorities of our age.  It’d be popular with the average person.  We can stop saying that Jesus is THE way and start saying he is A way.  We can stop saying that people are sinful and start saying that people need to be themselves.  We can trade out holiness for happiness.  And will we thrive?  Honestly?  Probably not.  But it’ll be comfortable, and a few people that are uncomfortable with the hard truth that other churches tell but that want the trappings of Christianity will walk through the doors hesitantly, and say to themselves, “Oh thank goodness, I found a reasonable church.  That’s great.”

Some of you may be thinking, geeze Vincent, tell me how you really feel.  The way you’ve presented it, that’s no option at all!  To the contrary, not only is the Pilate path an option, this would be a much easier option than all the alternatives.  None of us will have to work overtime.  None of us will have to have uncomfortable conversations.  Each of us will be free to relax.  Pilate lived a pretty good life, right?  He enjoyed a certain level of power in his heyday!  And we could too.  We could cling to our historic power and find ways to make it last.  What is truth, we’d ask.  And we’d eat and drink and be merry.

The second option is Paul’s option.  We can acknowledge that the world has changed its assumptions.  That they’re no longer eager to buy into what we’re saying.  A lot of what the average person assumes actually conflicts significantly with what God tells us.  And under these circumstances, we can say, “Welp, time to get out there and evangelize.”  And we’ll be weird in a lot of people’s eyes!  We’ll be those crazy outsiders that make wild claims that don’t make any sense.  But we’ll be those weirdos that chose Christ over Caesar.  The God of the next world over the God of this one.  It’ll be much harder.  But we stand to gain infinitely more.

We’re at the dawn of a new era, and a decision must be made.  I can’t answer this question for you.  Because this isn’t just a leadership decision or an institutional decision.  It’s not just the church that has to answer this.  It’s you.  Each and every one of you.

Pilate or Paul?
Power or Weakness?
Caesar or Christ?

Are you really willing to go all-in on this?  Because it’s not too late to cash out and enjoy the time we’ve got left.  It only costs your integrity.

Caesar or Christ?
Do you want to sell out?  Or are you going to go all in?

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.