Christians are Like Africans

When I entered seminary many years ago, I knew nothing about Africa. I thought of Africa as a place of mystery where everyone was black and modernity had still not found its way into all the crooks and corners of the continent.  But mostly, I thought of Africa as one place, not the many different, diverse places that it is.  It was in the company of a dozen or so students from African nations that I began to revise my understanding of the word “African.”   Sometimes, while eating lunch in the refectory with someone from Uganda or Kenya or South Africa or Malawi, I would draw the basic shape of the continent—I did know that much—on a napkin and ask them to show me where their country was.  One time I was with a group of people, each from a different country, who laughed when I told them I had always thought of Africa as one place.  “Oh no,” someone said.  “We are very different.”  I still don’t know much about Africa, but I do know that once you have said the word “African,” there is still more to be said before anyone can tell whom you are speaking about.  And so it is with the word “Christian.”

I write today in response to an article in the Washington Post about a new film version of what the world will be like after the rapture.  The rapture, you may know, is the idea that some day, all the people who have chosen to align with Jesus will be carried off to heaven, leaving everyone else to suffer the terrible consequences of not having chosen that path.  The creator of the film says his purpose in making it was basically to scare people into becoming Christians.  My purpose today is not to tell you all the reasons why that doesn’t sound to me like Christianity.  I write to say that Christianity is more than one country and more than one culture.  The article in the Post today is just not about the part of Christianity where I live.  When you hear the word “Christian” especially in the news, it is worth asking just which part of the continent is actually being discussed.

Christianity covers such a great diversity of beliefs, passions, hopes, traditions, sensibilities, personality types……I could go on.  I don’t even know if I can draw the outline of the continent of Christianity very clearly, or clearly enough that all Christians would recognize it, but I will try.  Christians are people who have chosen to throw their lot in with Jesus.  That’s it.  Any more detail than that would just wave the flag for my particular nation and maybe lead to arguments.  Christians are people who have chosen to go with Jesus.  That’ll do.  

Some have chosen to hitch their wagons to Jesus, who will not only get them into heaven, but help them lead others there.  Some hope Jesus will challenge and empower them to live meaningful lives serving those in need.  Some hope Jesus will give them courage  and words as they challenge those in power to see themselves as God’s stewards.  Many of the people I know who call themselves Christians don’t even talk much about Jesus.  They just find that in the community that gathers around the stories of Jesus, growth seems possible.  Some Christians seek a deeper grounding for their lives and are drawn to the the idea of Jesus whose humanity seemed to be grounded deeply in God.  Some Christians talk a lot about God and Jesus, others are silent.  Most of us probably have some mix of these elements and more in our make up.  

When I read stories like the one in today’s Post, I don’t want to change the movie-maker’s ideas about Christianity.  I just don’t want people to imagine those ideas when they hear the word “Christian.”  I wish I could say I don’t want them to hear only those ideas, but the truth is, those ideas offend my sense of what Christianity is about, so I don’t want people to go there when they hear “Christian.”  I am only human.  And I know that folks in some of those other nations on the Christian continent have similar feelings about me.  

Once, at a workshop for clergy, I heard a pastor ask one of my favorite, theologically-liberal writers how, with his ideas about Jesus, he could call himself a Christian.  The writer said he kept using the term because he wanted people to know there were many kinds of Christians.  I have wondered sometimes over the years how I might answer that question.  I think of a young man, still in college, who had agreed—sort of—to be baptized at the request of his mother who was only months away from death. He and I had to do some haggling about what he could affirm in choosing to be baptized.  In the end, the family gathered and I asked him simply if he could say that Jesus would be his way.  In learning and growing and becoming what God created him to be, would he choose Jesus as the path.  To that, he was able to say “yes,” and was baptized.  Why do I call myself a Christian?  Like that young man, it is the path I have chosen.  My understanding of that path has changed many times.  I’m sure it will change again.  “Christianity,” the continent in which my little country lies, is huge.  And I am pretty sure that the contour of this vast place, simply drawn, is “I have thrown in my lot with Jesus.”

John Baker  

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“That’s the kind of reading that makes me want to never come back to church.”

….you will be liable to the hell of fire.

….you will be thrown into prison. Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.
If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 
And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell.
I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

All of these statements were read as quotes from Jesus in churches around the world on Sunday.  I had planned to preach on the epistle for the day, but as I read these words and looked out at the dismayed faces of the congregation, I realized I would need to say something to try to take the sting out of the message.  I said something about the gospel before moving on to the sermon, but I came away from Sunday newly aware of what an awful job the Church sometime does of presenting its “good news.”  I was particularly concerned about visitors, about anyone who might be just sticking their toe in the church’s door after a long time away or maybe even for the first time.  Two people later reported hearing from their spouses about the reading, one saying, “that’s the kind of reading that makes me never want to come back to church.”  

So did Jesus really say that?  

The first place I go when I don’t like the gospel message and need to go looking for loopholes is to the book, The Five Gospels, an examination by a group of New Testament scholars known as the Jesus Seminar of what Jesus did and did not really say.  Christians have known and taught in seminaries for over a hundred years that many words attributed to Jesus are actually the words of a particular writer or community who had their own take on what Jesus was about.  That doesn’t make the words of the gospels any less capable of connecting us to God through Jesus, in fact that perspective often helps make the connection.  It does suggest, though, that we might use a little discretion in the way we present Jesus to those who are trying to make a connection.  

The fellows of the Jesus Seminar doubted that any of the quotes listed above came directly from Jesus.  The reading in question is from Jesus’ sermon on the mount, which runs for three chapters in Matthew’s gospel.  The only quotes in those three chapters the fellows felt surely belonged to Jesus were the section where Jesus talks about “turning the other cheek” if someone strikes you and giving more than what is asked, as well as “love your enemies” and the words “our father” when Jesus introduces the Lord’s prayer.  
In addition to the lines they feel sure about, the fellows of the Jesus Seminar classify many of the Jesus quotes in scripture as not exactly what Jesus said but probably very close to what he might have said.  None of the quotes from Sunday fit even into that category. 

And then there is the cultural problem.  

We now have liturgies for the ending of a marriage.  The church, at least the part with which I am in conversation, sees the ending of a marriage not as a sin, but as a sign of something broken that should be grieved.  It involves the death of a relationship and ways we hurt each other, but divorce is to be prayed over, blessed, healed and forgiven.  No one who is going through the pain and guilt and sorrow of divorce needs to hear the gospel reading appointed for this past Sunday when they come limping into church hoping for some sign of God’s love and acceptance.  

We can do better.  

Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t want to pick the readings for Sunday.  I like the challenge of having to preach on difficult texts.  But I am putting a note in my lectionary about the sixth Sunday after Epiphany in the year we read Matthew’s gospel.  I don’t plan to read that one again.  Not as the gospel on Sunday morning.  Of course I can do better too.  Part of what shocked me on Sunday morning was the realization that I had decided to preach on another reading without thinking of how this particular gospel reading would hit people.  It is the preacher’s job to help the congregation find something useful in the hard readings.  I should have said all this on Sunday.  I blew it.  The good news I should have delivered runs something like this.  

We, just like some of those first Christians, find it easy sometimes to put words of blame and condemnation in Jesus mouth.  It’s been going on for two thousand years, and it is a real problem.  I decided long ago to stay in the church anyway because there is something here I need.  Sometimes you have to dig deep to find it.  But in this case, modern scholarship and a church that really is being transformed lead me to believe in my heart of hearts that if you want to know where Jesus stands on anger, lust and divorce, the topics of Sunday’s gospel, you have to read between the lines.  There, you will hear Jesus saying with some authority, “turn the other cheek, love your enemies, and talk to God as someone you would expect to love and care for you, no matter what.”  Next time, I think I’ll just read those lines.  

John Baker

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New Furniture for the Church

We Episcopalians have always been proud of our take on how we know what’s what in this faith of ours.  In the old language, we talk about sources of authority—about how to know what to think about God and humanity, and what God might want us to be up to in this life.  We have said that good answers to such questions come from three sources, scripture, tradition and reason.  These three are often referred to as our Anglican, three-legged-stool.  

I was eating lunch with an old friend this week, a fellow priest, and we were talking about some of the challenges facing Christianity in a rapidly changing culture.  We talked about the place of sacred scripture and how difficult it can be to use language like “Word of God” to describe those writings in this modern era, one in which so many of us understand scripture to be very human responses to the experience of God and the deep desire to fathom the big questions in life.  I told my friend that I have come to think of scripture as a part of the tradition, that is, what those who have gone before have passed on in story, practice, and understanding.  I noted that such a classification would remove one of the legs from our three legged stool, and he said, how about experience.  I like it.  A new three legged stool for the new millennium.  Tradition, reason and experience.  Works for me.

When scripture is seen as a part of the tradition, our experience does indeed come to life in new ways.  We continue to add to the tradition.  If scripture is fixed and finished, then our task seems to involve reconciling our understanding to that of our ancestors in faith who wrote in response to their experience. If, on the other hand,  scripture is seen as a part of the tradition, then we are encouraged to be attentive to our experiences of the holy and to value those experiences as part of the ongoing story.  

Making experience the third leg of the stool suggests that our understanding of Christianity and its central call to our lives will change over time.  I’ve forgotten most of the verses to a children’s song by Harry Pritchett, but I remember the chorus and like it.  “Move go, change, grow, I don’t know exactly what or how it’s going to be.  Move, go, change, grow….the Lord is calling me.”  Over time, the center shifts, priorities change, all because God is at work among us.   And it isn’t just the experiences of religious biggies like popes and saints that change the landscape.   

We are all busy changing the tradition through our own experience.  It’s hard to believe in original sin when you are making googoo eyes at a new baby.  It’s hard to believe the Church’s teachings on same sex marriage when you know and love gay and lesbian folks whose lives are every bit as holy as any other human on the planet.  In a world where we are connected to people of all traditions and no tradition, it is hard to believe Christianity is the only worthwhile path for deepening relationship with God.  In our time, many parts of the Church are busy rethinking old ideas, testing new language, changing old rules, all in response to a culture that values the importance of personal experience. 

The tradition needs our input.  Rather than telling us what God will look like and how we should expect to experience God, the faith community can call us to be attentive to signs of the holy in us and all around us.  I said in the beginning of these writings that many of us stay around the Church even though there are many things about it we would like to see changed.  We stay because there is something here we need.  One of the things that keeps me here are those wonderful old stories within our tradition.  They remind me that people just like me, everyday people, some who were seeking God and others who were taken completely by surprise, had experiences they could only explain by struggling to speak of what is really beyond words.  In the Christian community we are called to that kind of good work.  We are encouraged to open our hearts to signs of God all around us and then return to the community to tell of what we have seen.  This is the way it has always been done.  This is the tradition of which we are a part.   

John Baker

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Time to Re-Think the Creed?

One of the challenges of preaching the church’s welcome to those who don’t believe everything we say, is that the church doesn’t always help with that message.  Imagine an impassioned ending to a homily that goes something like, “So don’t worry too much about what you believe.  If you want to be here, then there must be a reason.  You and God will work out what you believe just like those first disciples did.  They didn’t know what they believed either.  They just kept gathering together and things started to happen.  Don’t worry, just keep showing up.”  And then the preacher sits down and someone says, “Now, standing, let us affirm our faith using the words of the Nicene Creed.  We believe……”  And then comes that long list.  It happens.  And when it does this preacher has to note once more that there’s something wrong with the picture.  There it is again, that pesky creed.

I’ve been noticing the creed lately, not just because it speaks of belief, but also because of what the creed doesn’t say.  There really isn’t much in the creed about what it means to be a Christian.  Oh it has plenty to say about things like who Jesus is and how he is related to God, and about the whole Trinitarian, divine, cosmic scheme of things, but the creed doesn’t say anything about following Jesus, or loving our neighbor.  There’s nothing about the community coming together on Sunday or feeding the poor or aching to have our lives transformed.  I’m just not sure the creed deserves such a prominent place in the middle of our service any more.  It’s been around a long time, and ideas and understanding do change.

I’ve also been thinking about the creed because I see some communities around the world replacing the creed in their liturgy with what they call an “affirmation.”  Here’s one from the New Zealand Prayer book.

The Affirmation of Faith

You, O God, are supreme and holy.

You create our world and give us life.

Your purpose overarches everything we do.

You have always been with us.

You are God.

You, O God, are infinitely generous,

good beyond all measure.

You came to us before we came to you.

You have revealed and proved

your love for us in Jesus Christ,

who lived and died and rose again.

You are with us now.

You are God.

You, O God, are Holy Spirit.

You empower us to be your gospel in the world.

You reconcile and heal; you overcome death.

You are God.  We worship you.

And here’s one from the Iona Abbey worship book from the Iona Community in Scotland

An Affirmation of Faith

We believe in God above us,

maker and sustainer of all life,

of sun and moon,

of water and earth,

of male and female.

We believe in God beside us,

Jesus Christ, the word made flesh,

born of a woman, servant of the poor,

tortured and nailed to a tree.

A man of sorrows, he died forsaken.

He descended into the earth to the place of death.

On the third day he rose from the tomb.

He ascended into heaven

to be everywhere present,

and his kingdom will come on earth.

We believe in God within us,

the Holy Spirit of Pentecostal fire,

life-giving breath of the church,

Spirit of healing and forgiveness,

Source of resurrection and of eternal life. Amen

Both of these speak central themes from the Nicene Creed, and both add a bit of what Christians have come to value as central to the faith since those days.  Empower us to be your gospel (good news) in the world.   God beside us…servant of the poor…Spirit of healing and forgiveness.  Little changes and additions, but changes.  

It seems perfectly reasonable to me that if God is at work among us as we claim in our worship, and in our community life and our outreach to those in need, that God would also be working on our understanding of what life with God is about.  I am encouraged to see signs, like these affirmations, that Christians are at work updating the ancient framework of ideas around which we gather.  And it isn’t that I don’t think the Nicene Creed is important. I value it as a foundational piece of our history, a set of ideas that has anchored the tradition for sixteen hundred years.  It is just that there is so much more to say about who God is and what God is up to among us.  Still, the Creed is important. In fact, I think the Creed is so important we should give it it’s own feast day.  One Sunday a year we could really focus on the Creed in the context of its place in history and spend some time appreciating and celebrating its carefully crafted language.  

So what would we do in place of the Creed all those other Sundays?  I’m thinking of something a little more up-to-the-minute.  Imagine if right after the sermon, the preacher introduces a speaker, someone from the congregation who begins, “Hi, my name is Alice.  I want to tell you what I’m learning these days about what it means to follow Jesus, and tell you a bit about how that’s going.”  Maybe she’d talk for two or three minutes about some connection she was making between the gospel and her life, in a relationship, in caring for others, in hope, in seeing beauty in the world, in moments of silence or a walk by the river.  She might talk about learning to keep to the right path even when it costs something, or noticing systems that need to be challenged.  Maybe she would mention belief, maybe some new belief coming into focus, but however she told her story, she would be affirming a connection between God and humanity.  In that prominent place in the liturgy we would affirm not arguments settled long ago, but new insights into the nature of God reported by people just like us.  People who gather around those ancient ideas hoping that something new will happen in our lives.  

The Creed speaks of God choosing to come and live with us.  It speaks of the promise of new life on the other side of struggle and despair, and it speaks of our being empowered by God to become new people.  What it doesn’t say clearly is that all of those things are going on in our lives and the lives of those around us every day.   We’re the only ones who can affirm that part of the story.  So I wonder what you would say if it were your turn to speak.  What are you learning about what it means to follow Jesus?  How is that going?

John Baker

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Belief is Overrated

“Aw Mom, I don’t want to go to church today.”

“Why  not.”

“I’ve been going all these years and I’ve pretty much figured out I don’t believe all that stuff they say down there.”

“Well you still have to go.”

“Why?”

“You’re the priest.”

I spoke last time about wanting to provide encouragement for those interested in exploring what church might have to offer and who approach cautiously.  I spoke of familiar Christian words and themes that have become problematic even for those of us in the church.  Of all the words that might present obstacles for those taking another look or a first look at the church, I can’t think of one more fraught than the word, belief.  

The word has behind it not only deep history going back to the first Christians, who were called simply  believers, but also strained modern connotations colored by media stories where the word believer is used to describe a variety of people, but quite often those who struggle to hold the line against cultural shifts.  In many churches on Sunday the faithful stand up and say together, we believe, then recite a list of things any visitor would assume Christians must believe, or are at least supposed to believe—ideas that have, in fact, been considered the core of Christianity for most of two thousand years.  At funerals, one of the rare settings where people not connected with the church have a chance to see what we are about,  we quote heavily from John’s gospel where Jesus says those who believe won’t have anything to worry about at the end of their lives.  Those sayings are some of the most cherished and comforting in our tradition, but how do they sound to those who have no idea how belief is acquired, or worse still, how do they sound to one who has tried and been unable to lay claim to such belief?   We celebrate belief when we have it and ask God for more when we don’t.  We even ask forgiveness for unbelief as if belief were something we could control.  

The language we use would suggest that belief is at the center of everything we are about in the church, but I can tell you that is not the case in my experience.  When parishioners are asked why they belong to the church, an exercise we repeat for the congregation every few years, the answers have to do with belonging and acceptance, with being part of a community that can help shape their lives and the lives of their children, with being challenged to respond to the needs of others, with deepening a sense of spiritual connection in the universe.  We don’t hear much about belief.  It’s amazing to me that anyone who doesn’t already consider themselves a believer has the courage to come through the door on a Sunday morning, but they do, God bless ‘em.   I have great respect and admiration for those who ask if it is ok to stay around and participate even though they don’t believe everything on the list.  Fortunately, what they are looking for probably has less to do with beliefs and more to do with what happens in a congregation and what becomes possible in community.  

There are some Sundays when I am reading the words of our liturgy and wonder if they couldn’t be changed to better express the experience, and hopes and the important work of shaping our lives that brings us together. What I think happens for many of us is that we are raised with the church’s language, or we are helped through the door in a time when we are really looking for acceptance or guidance.  We focus on what we have found that helps us and much of the language that doesn’t connect fades into the background, like the wallpaper in a familiar room.  Once in a while we may notice things in the background that catch our attention because they don’t seem to fit our experience, but we have already grown accustomed to the room and we like it here so we work with the parts of the tradition that do fit and leave some of those other things leaning in the corner.  When people show up in our churches without the credentials of belief, concerned that they probably don’t believe all the right things and that somewhere down the line someone may catch them not believing all the right things, what they don’t know, and what we don’t usually tell them, is that many, even most of us in church on any Sunday are in the same boat…including the folks up front in those nice white robes.  JB