While We Were Yet Sinners . . .

But God proves his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. Romans 5:8

Before I could walk on my own my mother would hold my hand when I took steps, giving me just enough support so that I wouldn’t fall.  That simple gesture provided to wobbly children is an important addition to their development until they have the strength to go solo.  Sometimes children need a hand.

When I was still a pre-schooler my father was the rector for a private boy’s school in Brazil.  Quadrennially, the secondary school athletes at the school would participate in an Olympiad of sorts.  One year our school hosted the games and the teams from the various schools paraded through our city in their school colors accompanied by much fanfare.  I was too small to see above the crowds gathered on the street so my father, not a tall man himself, lifted me up so that I could see.  The blue and yellow uniforms of our school were vivid in the sunshine of that day and are still a striking memory for me.  Sometimes children need to sit on someone’s shoulders to see what there is to see.

In the first church I served, Jimmy, a man in our community, began attending.  Jimmy was unusual in many ways.  He never qualified for a driver’s license.  In his forties, he had never married and was living with his mother.  Holding a job was beyond his capabilities but he could carry on a conversation of sorts and he did have an unusual talent for the piano.  He played by ear and his melodies were traditional hymns which after a while all began to sound a little bit alike.  He frequently asked me if he could play during the Sunday School opening assembly and I had been reluctant to allow him to do so other than a few times.  However, Geneva, who had taken on the task of picking him up for church and then driving him home afterward, mildly reproved me.  I gave in.  Sometimes the church makes allowances for people as an act of grace.

Making allowances, giving people a hand, or boosting someone on our figurative shoulders, is in many ways at the heart of the church’s mission.  In Paul’s letter to the Romans he makes this central theological point, “God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.”  In other words, God’s grace is a given.  Grace is a hand up.  Grace is a boost.  Grace makes allowances for our frailties, our shortcomings, our weakness, or perhaps our lack of opportunities.  Grace comes for us, indeed, before us - before we ever respond.

John Wesley gave a name to this action of God.  He called it prevenient, or “preventing,” grace - the attribute of God to act on our behalf before and completely independent from whether or not we respond.  If someone has ever showered you with blessings which led you to think or say, “I don’t deserve this,” then pay attention to this - what we deserve has nothing to do with the blessing of God.  Blessing is a given - given before and whether or not we respond.  This grace is the attribute of God which affirms that we are beloved of God regardless of our inability, our inadequacy, our poverty, or any other deficiency on our part.  

When Jesus was baptized by John in the river Jordan the Spirit descended upon him like a dove and a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved . . .”  God’s voice was an affirmation to Jesus that God’s grace was a given before he began his ministry.  Likewise, when Christians are baptized, we are affirming that each one is also beloved.  Baptism is God’s prevenient, or affirming, action of grace given for us.  Like a hand given to help us walk, a set of shoulders to boost us up, or allowances made so we may be full participants in the community.

When Patricia Brennan went to high school, her textbooks were old and battered.  Some of the covers were missing and pages were torn or marked up.  The books had been previously used by students from another high school only two miles away who were at the same time using new textbooks.  Why the difference?  Patricia was attending what was then called the “colored” school, while the users of new books were all “white” teenagers.  At Patricia’s school, they had athletics - basketball, football, baseball, etc.  But they never had new uniforms.  Instead they made do with the hand-me-downs from the high school down the road.  The county school board didn’t see the necessity of equipping the colored school to the same standard as the white school.  They didn’t provide a hand up, a boost, or of allowances for the conditions that the colored students had to endure.

Nevertheless, Patricia went to college.  She overcame the deficiencies of her high school and succeeded in her career and has been a leader in the community where I live.  But I can’t help but imagine what more she might have done if the school board had been more affirming of her potential, and that of her fellow students?  What if she had been given a boost, or allowances to make up for the gaps between her school and the one down the road?  How would a measure of grace affirming her belovedness have boosted her potential in opposition to the negligence which she and her classmates had to endure?  And what of those who did not have the internal drive that Patricia had?  Would they not also have benefited from more affirmation?

In response to the Civil Rights Movement, our nation developed a public policy of “Affirmative Action” as a measure of grace for those who have, because of our society’s negligence, or even oppression, had to deal with significant challenges to their opportunity to reach their potential.  However, in recent years there has been a growth of ill will on the part of some against this affirmative action.  Interestingly, there seems to be agreement that it is a good thing to have diversity in education, the workplace, and society in general.  But most people, regardless of race, think that being judged on one’s merits is also a positive thing.  

But consider:  What if we don’t all start from the same place?  What if the starting line is such that persons who are identified as white are already at the 25 yard line of a 100 yard race?  What if people who are white have a financial advantage in the accumulation of wealth?  I am not suggesting that every white person has the same opportunity.  There are many white people who can testify to their lack of privilege, but these are anecdotal stories.  As a whole, people of color are generally starting far behind white people.  

For instance, African-Americans are half as likely to benefit from an inheritance as white people.  African-Americans are less likely to have a college education and thus tend to earn less income and have significantly less money set aside for retirement - leading of course to having less money to pass on to their children, thus starting the cycle all over again.  And when we consider that African-Americans are six times more likely to be involved in the criminal justice system one can easily see how the disparities are accentuated.  How can we judge people on their merits when some start so far behind in the first place?

Certainly Christians should see the theological context for affirmative action.  If Jesus Christ showers us with grace while we were yet sinners, shouldn’t that create in us empathy for those who need a boost themselves?  

When the people of Israel were being formed into a God-led community, God put a priority on their developing empathy.  “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”(Ex.22:20).  Such empathy for those who have suffered oppression is, or should be, a Christian attribute.  The apostle Paul evokes this quality of empathy in his argument in 1 Corinthians 10.  In speaking about “food offered to idols,” Paul states that Christians may eat whatever they wish with a clear conscience since such idols are nothing.  However, if such eating could cause someone who is weak in the faith to stumble Paul argues that we should refrain from partaking for the sake of the other’s conscience.  I have made the same argument about drinking alcohol.  Christians are free but we are not to use our freedom to the detriment of other people.  In fact, Paul makes this rather astonishing statement, “‘All things are lawful,’ but not all things are beneficial. ‘All things are lawful,’ but not all things build up.  Do not seek your own advantage, but that of the other.” (1 Corinthians 10:23-24) 

If we take this instruction seriously and truly seek the advantage of the other, then there should be no objection to taking affirmative action for those people who have experienced prejudice and oppression for generations.  To seek the advantage of the other requires changes to public policy - changes that give a helping hand, which give a boost, and which make allowances for those who have historically been denied opportunities.  Since we all are recipients of God’s affirming action on our behalf, how could we ever deny our own and our society’s similar action on behalf of others?  

      

Snap On Your Crash Helmet

 …No one’s ever seen or heard anything like this, 

        Never so much as imagined anything quite like it — 

What God has arranged for those who love him.  1 Corinthians 2:9

The Message

I remember the conversation with my father, himself retired after 40 years of service in the Methodist Church.  I was in my first appointment serving a small-membership congregation in a cove of the mountains of Western North Carolina, full of myself I suppose, and zealous — so eager to make a splash in my community — convinced that the church could be reformed and the world transformed by hearing the gospel.  After all, doesn’t Jesus say that the kingdom is breaking in among us?  What’s to stop the church from turning the world right side up?

Dad listened patiently as I stood on my soapbox, and then he humbly said, “Well, I just wanted to help people.”  

I suppose he was cautioning me to set my hopes a little lower, adding a dose of realism to my idealism.  Maybe he saw me as naive and in need of a wake-up call.  In any case, over the course of time I learned to curb my enthusiasm.  Painful experience taught me that what the gospel proclaimed as possible was often improbable when confronted by the intransigence of the church and my limitations as a leader.  My initial self-image as a prophet gave way to my adoption of the role of pastor - more often seeking to help people, like my father did, and only occasionally challenging them or myself with reform.

In those early years I remember also reading an editorial by Martin Marty, long-time editor of The Christian Century, in which he mused fondly on his local church.  No banner-waving crusades were led by that congregation.  Rather, they were engaged in more pedestrian ministries - helping in soup kitchens, supporting a missionary’s family, volunteering in local schools, sending short-term mission teams to hurricane-devastated areas.  Marty’s article, my Dad’s counsel, and my own discouragement at how difficult it was to stir up change in my own local church led me to gradually lower my expectations.  I sought to love my people who, after all, were each bearing some hurt and brokenness, in need of grace and healing.  I put a priority on comforting the disturbed, only once in a while disturbing the comfortable.

But looking back over the last several decades I wonder if I made the right choice.  I have witnessed the decline of the church - not only my denomination, but the church in general.  We seem to be going out with a whimper.  Maybe I should have been more forthright about the possibilities the gospel presents to us.  “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, what the Lord has prepared for those who love him.”  Does not Jesus challenge us with observing and living into the kingdom of God?  If resurrection is real, if the Holy Spirit is blowing hither and yon, and the kingdom of God is breaking in among us, why do we as a faith community settle for less?

Annie Dillard once wrote:

“Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a    packaged tour of the Absolute? … Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.”  Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 40-41.

I keep hanging in there with the church.  By and large, in our local church we love each other and I would give most of us the benefit of the doubt that we are doing the best we can to be Christians in the world.  But I think our notion of what it means to be Christian has generally been defused of its power.  When we baptize our children we seem to be following a social convention unaware of what God might do with them.  

Will Willimon, once the Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, was confronted by the parents of one of his students.

“What have you done with our daughter?” 

“What do you mean?”

“She was all set to go to medical school and become a doctor.  Now she says she’s dropping out of school, moving to Nevada to teach children on a Navajo reservation.”

Dr. Willimon responded, “I never told her to do that.  All I’ve done is preach the gospel.  I can’t control what God is doing in her life.”

My colleague “Duke” was teaching about Pentecost and the Holy Spirit breaking in on the disciples to a confirmation class.  He asked those twelve-year-olds what they thought about Pentecost.  The kids were all quiet for a moment, then, leaning back against the wall on the two hind legs of his chair one of the boys who seemed never to be paying attention said, “It means that God is loose in the world and there’s no getting away from him.”

I can’t help but wonder if God doesn’t expect more out of us.  Instead of sedately going about our business, sitting staidly in our pews, we more often should be strapping on our crash helmets for the wild ride we are on.  More of our children should be eschewing the normal path to the American Dream (so-called) in preference for counter-cultural choices.  Churches should be less often training up good citizens who go along with the flow, and more rabble-rousers getting into “good trouble,” as per the late John Lewis.

I admit I’ve become a bit tame with age, experience, and a good deal of pain.  I’ve become more conflict-avoiding over the course of time, but I’m thinking I should become more of a good trouble-maker.  Since God is loose in the world, there’s no telling what might happen.        

Bumper Sticker Theology

 [My wife has told me recently that I need to lighten up.  Here goes.]

…let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.  Matthew 5:16

I was once part of a small group of preachers who met weekly for sermonizing.  We shared our insights on the upcoming Sunday’s scripture passages and mined each other like 49’ers looking for nuggets - stories that might illustrate a particular theme.  Among the group, for a brief time, was a Southern Baptist who had, as a Ph. D. candidate, done a comprehensive study on the theology of bumper stickers one often sees plastered on the rear bumpers or windows of cars.  Bumper stickers cannot be particularly nuanced because in three to five words it is difficult to express much that is profound.  I wish I had a chance to read my colleague’s thesis but one can easily do one’s own musing on the spirituality of such messages.

“Catch the Spirit,” was popular among United Methodists back in the 70’s - a light-hearted encouragement to join in the fun of Wesleyanism.  No harm done, except the message failed to reckon with the reality that more often one is “caught up” by the Holy Spirit rather than catching (Him/Her) by one’s own initiative.  Catching the Spirit is likely to be as elusive as trying to harness the wind (I believe Jesus had something to say about that).

“Praise the Lord,” is another popular one which again seems rather harmless except that it conjures up memories of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and their greedy bastardization of the gospel.  Their dream amusement park, Heritage USA, remains largely a ghost town as a reminder of how little the lordship of Jesus actually held sway in their thinking.

“WWJD?” or  “What Would Jesus Do?” is a prod to our conscience, asking us to consider the will of Jesus in our decision-making.  This sentiment has been critiqued by those who claim it is asking too much of us to act as perfectly as the Messiah.  Still, I see the value in it.  After all, the apostle Paul did encourage us in this way, “Let this mind be in you which was in Christ Jesus . . . ,” as he went on to commend servanthood to us.  We could do worse than consider WWJD.

“Jesus Is Coming, Look Busy,” is so terrible I don’t know where to begin to tear it apart.  On the positive side, if there is one, Jesus does encourage us to be at work in the vineyard at all times.  However, “looking busy” is not the point as that smacks of hypocrisy.  Also, there is this undertone that Jesus is coming with vengeance to smite those who are not busy - a far cry from the good news of the gospel.

Equally terrible but for different reasons we have “In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned” (sic).  While popular in some circles, the notion of rapture is a fantasy blown completely out of biblical proportion.  The idea that Christians will be snatched up into heaven like Elijah before an end-of-the-world tribulation was concocted with questionable biblical interpretation by a fringe element in the 1800’s (Darbyism).  Rational theology has long since discredited Darby.  Needless to say, self-piloted cars are more the workings of new technology than of spiritual transcendence.

Less fantastical, but inane, is “Honk if you love Jesus.”  I mean, what’s the point of that?  If everyone complied our roadways would constantly sound like a gaggle of geese to no one’s edification.  Someone obviously saw the opportunity and responded with a more helpful bumper sticker, “If you love Jesus, work for justice.”  While not as popular, it was more true to the essence of gospel.

I love the pervasive “COEXIST,” sticker that is made up of symbols from various world religions.  While each religion typically makes some claim to exclusivity on truth, there is no reason why we need to attack one another lest we, in biblical fashion, “devour one another.”  I suspect if we listen to each other’s grasp on the truth we may find more in common and have reason to not only coexist but also to cooperate for the good of us all.

I suppose the intent of any bumper sticker is to give a witness about what you believe or what’s important to you - like letting your light shine before others.  Of course, some stickers are simply whimsical, and that’s a kind of witness, too.  But I remember the words attributed to St. Francis that he’d rather see a sermon than hear one.  That might keep a few more stickers off our bumpers and generate more witness that actually testifies to the reign of God in our midst.  Peace.  

Epiphany Insurrection

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.  John 1:5

In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.  Matthew 5:16

[The following was initially written in the heat of anger on January 7, 2021.  I have let it sit for a year but have only made a few changes.  I am still angry, mostly at myself, but more hopeful.]

I had a role in the insurrection at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. on January 6, the day of Epiphany, 2021.  Not directly, of course.  I would never engage in hooliganism, much less, desecration of the respected national halls of our country.  Still, I am complicit.  There is plenty of blame to go around - scapegoats innumerable - but as they say about pointing the finger, there are ample fingers pointing back at me.  

What was my role, then?  I was for over 30 years until 2018 a pastor and I accept responsibility for any way I contributed to the overwhelming failure of the Church in America to hold true to the gospel rather than acquiesce to the nationalistic impulses that have watered down the message of Jesus in this country.  This failure has occurred over generations and is no one person’s fault, yet if we are to stand any chance of redemption it must begin with confession of the Church’s complicity in its prophetic calling.  

Okay, maybe I’m being too hard on myself.  I did try.  I engaged in difficult conversations with people who disagreed with me.  I preached prophetic sermons that offended people, some of whom left the church I was serving to go worship somewhere else.  But I always felt like I could have done more, and I am not alone.  Recent history has sharpened my awareness of the inadequacy of the Church’s witness and mine.   As a leader in the church I must claim my own culpability. 

The prophetic calling which the Church has overlooked is found in the words of Isaiah, quoted by Jesus at the beginning of his ministry, setting the theme for his righteous kingdom-establishing work:  

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

    because he has anointed me

        to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

    and recovery of sight to the blind,

        to let the oppressed go free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”  (Luke 4:18-19)

The error of the Church in America has been the abandonment of this obvious mandate to work for justice in preference for an overly sentimentalized message about the individual’s need for reconciliation with God.  Of course, such redemption of the individual is a part of the gospel.  But if all that matters is getting one’s heart “right with God,” then one can ignore a multitude of existing social ills.  If all that matters is adding souls to the church rolls, then one can avoid messy confrontations with the principalities and the powers.  

The Church has focused on personal reconciliation with God and too often ignored our need to be reconciled to each other, all across the world.  

We have too often diminished the Church’s mission to the poor by serving only their basic needs while ignoring the institutional systems that lead to their poverty.  

The Church has sought to comfort the oppressed without addressing the societal structures that contribute to their oppression, nor have we often challenged the oppressor. 

Instead of “proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor,” we have sought to accommodate a culture that has obviously promoted some as more favored than others.  As one rare prophet declared about the Church, we have been content to have our fellowship meals, Bible studies, building programs, and membership drives while blindly allowing our institutions to do our sinning for us.

There are prophetic voices that have sounded the alarm, calling the Church to account, but too many of us have preferred the easy path, the wide way that leads to destruction.  The conservative evangelical movement’s unquestioning allegiance to the politics of power are particularly egregious but mainstream Protestantism has also been culpable in its failure to emphasize the fullness of Jesus’s message.  As mainstream denominations have seen their membership fall off in the last half century, the emphasis has been on church growth while the sharper edges of the gospel have been softened lest we give offense to existing and potential members.  We emphasize Jesus as Savior but sugar-coat Jesus as Lord.  But in making the gospel more palatable it no longer is gospel, and we are no longer the Church.

The events of January 6, 2021 should have come as no surprise.  They are the direct result of what Donald Trump had been fomenting from the very beginnings of his assault on the Office of President.  We knew who he was from the outset.  He made no pretense to being anything other than an amoral, self-aggrandizing, narcissistic liar who would say and do anything that would keep him in the spotlight.  At least he was honest.  He said who he was and did what he set out to do - no matter how unprincipled and unethical.  He made no pretense to being a leader for all, but only for those who walked in lockstep with him.  And any of us in the Church who embraced him, or who tried not to offend those who did embrace him, are guilty of a moral failure to point out the travesty he was all along.  The fact that many self-identifying Christians have supported him is a testament to the lengths to which the gospel has been perverted. This is not a matter of liberal versus conservative but a matter of truth versus falsehood, right versus wrong.  That we, as a country, had to endure the Epiphany insurrection is a national shame, and is at least in part due to the failure of the Church to be the salt of the earth, the leaven in the loaf, or the herald of “good news for the poor . . . and release for the captives.”  

Last January’s events should lead us to reflect on whom we as a democratic nation want to be.  Are we truly a nation promoting liberty and justice for all?  And for the people of God, called to be “a light to the nations” on the day of Epiphany, we should be pondering whether our light has been hidden “under a bushel,” and what kind of light we will now become.

As part of my desire to shine a holy light, and to atone for my previous failures, I am attempting to help our church become advocates for racial healing and reconciliation in our community.  There are those who wish our church would just stop talking about this issue - which is a sure sign of how badly the Church has failed to live up to our calling to follow Jesus.  I now know, to a degree I never realized before, just how difficult a task it is to do this ministry of reconciliation.  The great strides of the civil rights movement in the 50’s and 60’s filled me with great hope, but now I see how much work there remains to be done.  And the work of racial reconciliation is but one of the many tasks that need the attention of Jesus’ followers.  

May this year’s Epiphany be the beginning of a renewed festival of light revealing the glory of God.  We each have a light to shine.  Even a light as small as a candle the darkness cannot overcome (as we read in the first chapter of The Gospel of John).  Even such a great darkness as fell upon the Capitol Building last year will not defeat us if each of us shines what light we have for all to see.