Tag: Sermon

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.

Questioning Authority

~ Vincent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Micah asked him, “Where are you from?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re a Christian, right?”

“Yeah.”

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

“Yeah.”

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

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

The Authentic Self

~ Vincent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Augustine, Confessions

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

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

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

-Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Confessions

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turn in your Bible to Romans 3 verse 9:

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

Reformation Day

~ Vincent

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

Happy Reformation Day, everyone!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other words, he wants to visit them.

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

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

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

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

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

because it is the power of God 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

Relative Truth

~ Vincent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Series: The Gospel in a Postmodern World

~ Vincent

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