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myshkin press

2006-08-15

Faith and politics: a critique from within.

One of my fellow interns gave the sermon at our office chapel service a couple of weeks back. I really liked the way he managed to critique both conservative and liberal preaching he had heard for the ways it had abused the Bible. His sermon was an exercise in walking the line between Biblical legalism and popular culture dressed up as Chrisitnaity. I asked and Steve agreed to let me publish the whole sermon, so here it is:

"I'd like to open with some well-known words, attributed to St. Patrick:

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down,
Christ when I sit,
Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.


I realized a couple of years ago that I've grown up to be a bit of a church nerd. And, while I've been involved in many types of churches and think they all have their bit to offer, in recent years I’ve sort of become a partisan: I'm devoted to ancient tradition, to smells and bells, to liturgy, and especially to the lectionary.

I grew up in a particular kind of evangelical church, in which the sermon frequently began with, "Bear with me; we're gonna be flipping around a lot today," - flipping pages of the Bible around to create some composite text and pet reading from a dozen favorite verses, often stripped from their contexts. So I've come to appreciate sermons based on just one or a couple of more substantial passages. And, in a church that follows a lectionary, I especially like that the subject of the day is defined by something larger than whatever the pastor happens to want to talk about.

One person's novelty is another's tired routine, and perhaps it's in part the fact that I've only been out of low-church evangelicalism for four or five years that makes the lectionary and church year so meaningful to me. I'm very taken with the idea: Each year, in the context of Christian community, we systematically trace the life of Jesus and of the very early church. Following the church calendar for Sundays and other holy days, we observe Christ's death, resurrection, and ascension each once a year, on appointed days.

But today's readings come from a different lectionary, from the two-year cycle of daily readings associated with the Anglican liturgies for the Daily Office—for Morning, Noon, Evening, and Night Prayers. Like so many things in the Book of Common Prayer, these liturgies are a) completely gorgeous and b) contributors to Anglicanism's not entirely deserved reputation as "Catholicism Lite."

The readings for weekday prayers have little connection to the main arc of the church year. Open up the Daily Office lectionary in the middle of the summer—in Ordinary season—and you might find, as Jamie did last month, a very odd story of prophecy and power (Numbers 23:11-26) to go with your even more cryptic parable (Matthew 22:1-14). Or you might find, as I did when I looked up today's readings, the story of Ehud, who delivered the Israelites by assassinating the Moabite king Eglon, a man so heavy that his belly closed around Ehud's sword (Judges 3:12-30). We skipped that one.

We skipped it in favor of Matthew's account of Christ's death (27:45-54), and Luke's of his ascension (Acts 1:1-14). A tough choice, actually, for a first-time preacher without formal training. Which is more challenging, saying something fresh about these utterly central texts, or saying anything at all about Ehud and Eglon? I'm not actually going to exegete Matthew and Acts—because I'm not qualified to do so, because I wouldn't know where to start, and especially because I don't think careful analysis is at this point the most useful way of thinking about these particular texts.

Instead, I want to talk a little bit about how difficult it often is for me—and, I think, for many left-leaning, justice-seeking Christians—to balance my enthusiasm for the red-letter words with my strong sense that my spirituality and theology must be based primarily not in what Jesus said, but in who he was and is, in what he came to earth to accomplish.

Many of the medieval mystics are famous for their intense meditation on Jesus' suffering. They found in the Passion the very core of their spirituality. It's easy today to criticize them for an excess of piety, but they were definitely onto something: They understood that our identity in Christ has deep roots in our membership in his suffering and death, in which we share in some small way, and for which, theologically, we are all culpable. We know this, too. And we know also that our Christian hope centers on Christ's resurrection and ascension.

Each of these events comes up multiple times in the weekday readings of the Daily Office, not as Holy Week or Easter season texts but just sort of wherever. I take this as a reminder that, while I might spend 15 very serious hours at church during Holy Week, I'm missing the point if I wait a whole year to again take time to meditate on Christ's Passion and triumph.

So I'm often frustrated by how difficult it can be to find a church that is socially liberal but that regularly preaches Christ as victim, as victor, as Lord. We affirm these theological truths in reciting the creed and receiving at the Lord's table, and we sing about them in our songs and hymns. But liberal preaching, when it engages scripture at all, so often is content to extract only ethical teaching and not theological truth. A Sunday gospel reading will never consist of the passage that we heard read this morning. But it might well be a text with tremendous consequences for our spirituality—and for our Christology, for our understanding of the identity of the way, truth, and, life, who claimed to be the only one through whom a person can approach God.

We do well to reject hateful and ardently exclusive readings of difficult passages. But we add little to the conversation if, instead of offering better ways to read particular texts—or better ways to read scripture in general—we treat the Bible's truth claims as curiosities to be tacitly acknowledged, largely ignored, and generally feared.

In some churches, on almost any Sunday one could walk in quite late, just in time for the homily, and come to the conclusion that the day's readings must have focused entirely on inlusivity, love of neighbor, and social justice. But this is statistically improbable. For instance, did you know that, out of over 31 thousand Bible verses, only two thousand are about the poor? But the whole of scripture points inevitably to the theme of redemption—social redemption, yes, and this is so very important. But it points also the spiritual reconciliation of imperfect people to a perfect God. For Christians, the overall biblical story culminates in the cross, the empty tomb, the clouds, the promised return.

Many liberal pastors preach continually about justice and tolerance—and thank God that they do, especially when they ground this emphasis in theological faithfulness to the person of Christ. But without this grounding, such preaching seems to be merely an equally thin liberal alternative to the preaching on which I was raised: In both cases, the pastor basically talks about whatever he or she wants to talk about. The evangelicals I grew up among often took the Bible's Jesus and proof-texted and bullied him into submission. Today, many evangelicals—in the interest of being relevant—reduce Jesus to a friendly, non-threatening self-help guru. And in more liberal churches, the Bible and Jesus are frequently sidelined, ignored, or subjected to fleeting, fearful glances. Is this really a better option?

And what are we afraid of, anyway? I certainly hope that, when we allow peace and love to eclipse Christ’s body instead of flowing from it, we don't do so out of fear of losing our influence and relevance. A quick look at American religious history should dispel that anxiety: When Christian liberalism pushes the cross to the margin, its churches wane while more conservative groups thrive.

But I think our biggest fear is not of irrelevance but of seeming—or being—exclusive and intolerant, of fulfilling this expectation that so many secular people have of all people of faith.

As an evangelical youth-group kid, I had a t-shirt that featured a picture of Jesus on the cross and the words, "If I'm okay, and you're okay, explain this!" I liked to wear it under my denim jacket covered with pins from bands with names like Whiteheart, and Whitecross, and White Men Playing Last Year's Fad Music For Jesus' Glory and Definitely Not Their Own. At some point, I decided that this aggressive faith branding was offensive and silly—but I never did come up with a satisfying answer to the shirt's question, a major and perennial one: If pluralism trumps orthodoxy, what space remains for the cross?

My sister works for Youth With a Mission, an organization that preaches the gospel—the regular one, not the social one—around the globe. Much of Libby's work is in majority-Muslim countries. While I pray often for her safety and happiness, I've never quite had the stomach to support her work financially. My grandmother does support her. But I've seen her write the checks, and she does it with a furrowed brow and a heavy heart. The missionary family she married into was full of medical doctors; they cared for people's physical needs. A lot of liberal Christians are relieved by this sort of works-based evangelism, by any affirmation that we can perhaps preach the gospel at all times but never actually find it necessary to use words. Each month, Grandma sighs and sends Libby her check. "I just don’t know if we have the right," she told me once, "to go over there and tell them that our God is better than theirs."

Many of us share this profound hesitation. We're happy to talk about our faith with those who approach us, but we recoil at the idea of going into all the world. And we dread questions like, "What if it doesn't matter what you believe? What if God decides to save everyone?"

Richard Neuhaus—editor-in-chief of First Things and no champion of religious liberalism—once addressed this anxiety openly in the magazine's pages. The editors then received several letters criticizing Neuhaus for entertaining visions of pluralism, for cracking open the orthodoxy door that leads to chucking it all as so much noncommittal talk—and sleeping in on Sundays, or maybe going out for brunch.

Neuhaus's published response stuck with me. He said that our orthodoxy does not allow us to claim dogmatically that all in fact will be saved. But our deference to God's authority requires us to grant the possibility—because our understanding is limited, and because it isn't our decision to make. What's more, our Christian ethics demand that we conceive of this—of a heaven inhabited by all people—as a good and desirable thing. We ought to consider this possibility with tremendous joy and relief, not with indignation at all the rules we will have needlessly followed, all the prayers wasted, all the boring church attended.

I showed Neuhaus's response to my evangelical father. He said, "Sure, like in the parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16). Everyone is paid equally for different amounts of work, and the landowner criticizes those who worked longer for their indignation at the generosity shown to others." So I imagined this parable with my own apocryphal coda: When the workday is over, the landowner goes out into the streets and starts handing out money—a day's wages—to everyone he sees, to people who neither worked in the fields for even a moment nor ever asked the landowner for anything at all.

It seems clear—and important—that the landowner's response to the disgruntled workers would remain just as Matthew records it: "I am doing you no wrong," he would say. "Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Are you envious because I am generous?" But it's equally important to remember that the scenario I just described is not actually part of the biblical story. We should consider the comforting idea that Christ might save all people. It's a bit more difficult to claim this dogmatically, and it’s another thing entirely to downplay the crucified and risen Christ as the only one who saves whomever he chooses to save. But perhaps the weakest option of all is to avoid the topic entirely, and to avoid with it any serious wrestling with Jesus' identity, and with our identity as specifically—a word that makes me bristle with its hints of exclusion—believers in and members of his death, resurrection, ascension, and present reign.

The last thing Jesus says to his disciples before disappearing into the clouds is that they will be his witnesses to all the earth. What did the disciples witness? Christ's Sermon on the Mount, his identification with "the least of these," the dignity and worth he affirmed in all people? Of course, but so much more. They saw him die an agonizing and unjust death. They saw the empty tomb, the risen Savior, the death wounds in his living body. And they bore witness to his being caught up into the sky, and to the angels who promised his return.

"Give the ruler your justice, oh God" (Psalm 72:1). This morning's psalm is understood by both Jews and Christians to speak of a messiah, an ideal ruler, one whose justice comes not from human strength but from God. God's will is done on earth as it already is in heaven—that's where it all begins. It's crucial that, in our enthusiasm to be doers of the word, we don't neglect our theology. The question, "What would Jesus do?" should never crowd out the even more primary question, "Who is Jesus?"

When faced with an apparent choice between the social gospel and the cross, the best response is of course to reject this as an utterly false set of options. Through the cross, we understand that true love of others requires bitter sacrifice. Through the cross, we understand ourselves as instruments of Christ's grace to a world in need of it. Writing in Sojourners, Ched Myers describes the way of the cross—Jesus' model for our discipleship—as nonviolent resistance in the face of an oppressor's very instrument of death, a resistance that concedes nothing while refusing to answer violence with more violence. Most importantly, we believe that it is through the resurrected Christ that all things—broken individuals, relationships, social systems, the earth itself—are restored and renewed.

I’d like to close in prayer:

Jesus, you are our teacher and our example. You are our parent, sibling, and companion. You are judge, law, and advocate; and you take our punishment in our place. In your life on earth you showed us how to live; in your death and resurrection you give us life. Your lordship is our common creed. Christ our all, be ever present in our hearts and minds. Amen."



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