Community Matters

Tomorrow is election day. In Idaho that means all the Republicans go to the polls and pick the winners and the rest of us go to the polls because our mothers (RIP) would be really disappointed in us if we didn't.

A couple of weeks ago the Gospel reading from the Lectionary was the passage in Matthew 21 about paying taxes to Caesar. Being just the "Interim" pastor, I mustered the courage to skate out onto some fairly thin ice around the question of whether or not there is "A Christian Position" that should be help by all believers on a variety of choices related to issues and candidate selection when "election day" rolls around. 

Here are a couple of thoughts from that message:

The question the Pharisees and Herodians asked Jesus had only one motive. It was intended to define and divide the religious community along political, NOT theological lines. "Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?" was a really dumb question. Paying taxes to Caesar WAS the law. So, the question was really, "What does God think about paying taxes to Caesar?" The question, updated for our time, might have been, "Is there a Christian position on this political issue?"

It's a good question. Is there ever an "orthodox" position on a civil, political issue? 

At the time this question was asked there were a variety of strongly held views within the Jewish community about Israel's relationship to Rome. I'm indebted to Scott McNight's recent article on his "Jesus Creed" blog for help with this. He sites Christopher Bryan's book, Render Unto Caesar: Jesus, the Early Church and the Roman Superpower, identifying 4 very different responses to this question

• Acceptance of Roman rule and full cooperation with Rome
• Acceptance of Roman rule, coupled with a willingness to challenge the secular power nonviolently
• Non-violent rejection of Roman rule
• Violent rejection of Roman rule

The point Bryan makes, and it's the point I want to make as well, is that each of these positions found support within Jewish religious tradition.

So, there wasn't one position that could be said to capture "God's perspective" on this political question.

There have always been those who have attempted to define and divide the faith community along political lines.  "Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?"  What is the Bible position on slavery? (Don't forget that both "sides" were quoting scripture on this one.) Is there a Biblical position on gender equality? Is there a Biblical position of capital punishment, birth control, public education, and of course the list could go on until we all felt threatened and uncomfortable. 

The opinions of Christians vary widely on most, if not all of these issues.  The one thing that is absolutely, certainly true is that each of us who identify as disciples of Christ, and who take that discipleship seriously believe our position to be Christian as well.

I'm thinking right now of one of my favorite sermons of John Wesley. It's called "The Catholic Spirit" (Catholic simply meaning "universal.")

Wesley makes three points that are relevant to this conversation

• We all have opinions, and we all believe our opinions to be correct.
• There are matters that factor into every opinion that we hold of which we are simply, and completely unaware.
• Regardless of what we think, we are most certainly wrong  on some point or another

Wesley implores the church to value community above personal opinion. And, he warns against the false notion that when we create a congregation with no difference of opinion we have created the "church." 

We need look no farther than the 12 men on whom Jesus chose to build his church. These guys NEVER agreed with each other, and they certainly never agreed on matters political.

It would be good, I think, to take a look at the people who came to Jesus with this question. Herodians and Pharisees were as opposed to one another politically as, well as the "right-side" of the "Tea Party" and the "left-side" of the "left side." They had one thing in common. Jesus scared the crap out of them. I'd like to suggest that the folks on either side of the political spectrum who want to force the Christian community to accept "their" position have a lot in common with the Herodians and the Pharisees. They are terribly threatened by Jesus, because Jesus can never be counted on to support "our" agenda, regardless of what it is. 

Here's where, I suppose, I run the greatest danger of being misunderstood. I'm not suggesting that every opinion is just as valid, or just as "Christian" as every other opinion. As disciples of Jesus we MUST believe in the sanctity of human life. But the way you vote, and the persons you support  in your effort to protect the sacredness of human life may vary greatly in the reality of our culture and context.

As disciples e of Jesus Christ we MUST believe in the responsibility of those who have much to care for those who have little. Believe what you will about the best political and economic structures to provide that care.

As a disciple of Jesus Christ you MUST recognize every person as God’s beloved child, the object of Christ’s sacrificial love, believe what you will about the best way for the church to express that love in ways that lead to redemption.

A wise friend of mine once said, "The Christian choice between one political party or another is simply a choice of which stream we're going to swim up." No political party promotes a Gospel agenda. All I am saying, and I'm sure it's been said before, is that when we allow the community of faith to be defined and divided by political ideology we have allowed the “image of the emperor” to slip from the coin in our pocket to the core of our identity and when the Image of the Emperor is stamped on the church of Jesus Christ it ceases to be the Church. 

The Church must decide whether she's going to be Christ's Body or Caesar's buddy. We can't have it both ways.

Obedience Matters

The Gospel passage for last Sunday was about as familiar as a New Testament text can be. A pharisee asked Jesus, "Which is the greatest commandment?" And Jesus responded by quoting two foundational passages from the Old Testament, The Shemah, "Love the lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind," and the last lines from the restatement of the Ten Commandments found in Leviticus 19, "Love your neighbor as yourself." I'd written a reasonably good sermon around that text which I might actually get to preach someday. What "came out" as I spoke was quite different from what was planned. Here's an abbreviated version of what I heard myself saying on Sunday morning.

Jesus said, "all the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments." He also said, in the context of the Sermon on the Mount, "I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it."

One of the great failings of the American Church of the last half century has been our willingness to assume that Jesus obeyed the law for us. We hate the idea of punishment, so we love the idea of "substitutionary atonement." The only thing we like better than the notion that Jesus took the "whooping" that we deserve is the idea that Jesus also did the obeying that is called for in scripture from beginning to end. We've been told that, when we get to the "Pearly Gates" and Peter asks us why he should let us in, all we have to do is point to Jesus and say, "I get in because HE obeyed."

Hogwash!

Jesus did not come to obey the law for his children. He came to make it possible for his children to live the life for which we were created and to which we are called. In the words of Old Testament Theologian, Gerhard, Von Rad, "The purpose of all God's redemptive activity was to created for himself a people wholly capable of obedience." (Old Testament Theology). Either the complete obedience to God's law, which, by the way, has always been the "Law of Love," IS possible for all of God's children in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit or the whole redemption story is a crock.

I'm just about convinced that our willingness to let Jesus do all the obeying is behind at least a couple of issues in and around the modern American Church.

First, our failure to live lives of obedience, our failure to live lives organized around undivided love for God and energized by undivided love for neighbor is the main reason the "world" doesn't think much of the church today.  Jesus said that our obedience (The way we love God and the way we love one another) would be the way the world knew that we were his and that the Kingdom had come.

Second, our willing to settle for "substitutionary obedience" is the reason there is so little genuine "victory," so little joy, and so little to celebrate in the church today. We don't see changed lives because we don't expect changed lives.

I'm not sure how we got here. Most of what's wrong with the church I like to blame on "T.V. evangelists." I do think we've bought into a generic evangelicalism that seeks to sell faith the way folks sell cars; no money down and payments anyone can afford. But beyond that I think we've forgotten that the obedient life, the life lived out of an undivided heart of love for God and neighbor is not the "old heart" retrained. It is the "New Heart" reborn. God let Ezekiel in on the secret when he said, "I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh."

Somewhere, somehow, I think stopped calling our people to pray for a "New Heart" and started helping them "settle" for what they could accomplish by trying to retrain the old one.

Church Matters

First, I'd like to give you the opportunity to listen to a song that's becoming one of my favorites. It's by our son-in-law. Aaron writes good songs, and performs them well. (Is life in the music industry was "fair" you would already know about Aaron and his songs.) This is one of my favorites.  I hope you enjoy the song. It will have something to do with what I want to say in this post. 

How to Bake Bread by Aaron Mark Brown
(can't get the link to work. Aren't you glad there's Google?

Last Sunday I was asked by a local pastor to come and speak to his congregation. He had a specific request.  "Gene," he wrote in a facebook message, "How about sharing from your experience as Chaplain and what the needs are for 20 somethings today, how the church can minister to them. It would be a timely subject for our people. Thanks!,,

I know, EVERYONE, has written, or spoken, or both on this topic for the past decade. I thought about the books I'd read on the topic; David Kinnaman's "You Lost Me," Kenda Creasy Dean's "Almost Christian," and more blogs and articles than can possibly be remembered. And I thought about the young adults it's been my joy to know over the past 22 years.

The "Church-Kids" I've come to know have engaged the  local church in a variety of ways. A few have found church homes in the local community within a few weeks of arriving in their new surroundings. Some of them have spent the better part of their college career "shopping" or simply "visiting." More than a few have done what I did during my Sophomore year of college, they've stopped going altogether. The issue, I suppose, is not how young adults engage the church during college as much as it is the ways in which they will, or won't "re-engage" the church after they have graduated.

I began on Sunday morning by asking the congregation, (about 100 people, mostly "grandparent" age) why they thought young adults had left the church. The 4-5 reasons they offered had one thing in common, they were all about "the WORLD" and how "the WORLD" had influenced our young people. 

Most of the books and articles I've mentioned and read would disagree. "They," that is "the WORLD" are not responsible for the loss of our young. "We," that is the CHURCH" have done this to ourselves. And I agree with this assessment.

So, here are a couple of thoughts, certainly not original with me, on what I think it is that "we" have done that has resulted in the absence of a pretty significant group of "churched" young people.

• We taught them from a VERY young age to sing and to say "Jesus Loves ME." 

• We made "special churches" just for them called "youth groups" where they could get all the way to adulthood without having to bother with adults. 

• We've made church about "church" and not about the Kingdom of God, and, for many of the young adults I've known, "church" is too small a cause to call for the devotion of a life.

Let me know if you think any of these three merit further conversation and we'll make space for it.

What's to be done about all of this? On Sunday morning I suggested that the answer (also, in no way original with me) might just lie in our remembering and remodeling what was going on in the earliest church of all. So, we wandered over to Acts 2:37-46.

Verses 37-41 are what we would call the "big finish" and the "altar call" at the end of Peter's first sermon. In the "big finish" we learn that the focus of Peter's preaching is Jesus. That's it, just Jesus. In the "altar call" we learn that the issue was NOT escaping eternal punishment, but breaking the grip of this "currupt generation."

And, as it turns out, many (3000 on that particular day) were willing to hear the good news of God's grace and break free from the clutches of culture.

In verse 42 we find a brief account of the daily practice of folks who had been set free from the domination of culture. They devoted themselves to the "Apostle's teaching."  That is, they looked for chances to listen to people who knew Jesus tell stories about what He had done, and what He had said. They devoted themselves to the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. They devoted themselves to fellowship. And fellowship, by the way, doesn't happen in a structured service on a Sunday morning. Fellowship means doing life together. And they devoted themselves to prayer.

Most churches, and most attenders "like" all of those things, good teaching, fellowship, communion (now and then), and prayer. Not so many of us are "devoted" to any of them.

In verses 43-46 we get a look at the quality of community live that seems to have grown out of this kind of daily practice. It was a life of genuine compassion. These folks cared more about the needs of people around them than about their own "stuff." They began to see their own "private property" as a potential means of meeting the "meetable" needs of folks in their community. (How have we come to see the needs of folks in our community as a threat to the safety of our "private property?) It was a life filled with good times, great fellowship, and a willing to praise God publicly for the gift of new life.

And one other thing. It seems like this new community of Jesus followers lived in such a way that they were actually liked by and "enjoyed the favor" of those in the outside community.

Well, what does this have to do with the question, and what on earth does it have to do with the song?
Young adults have left a church that has left its mission. Young adults have left a church that has stopped seeking truth in the words of Jesus and settled for seminars on adapting corprate practice to congregational activities. Young adults have left a church that, in many ways, has gotten so caught up in doing things Jesus never told them to do that there's little time to do the two or three things that he did tell them to do. Young adults have left a church that has become obsessed with its own safety and prosperity. Young adults have left a church that tells them to "escape from this wicked generation" only to invite them into a culture that is little more than a stained glass reflection of that generation's values and practices.

And this is where the song comes in. "Old folks" like me whine about the loss of our youth and pine for the "good old days" when it wasn't like it is today. We look for something new, something "shiny," something contemporary, something we don't have, but if we did we're pretty sure we'd be able to invite, or at least entice a generation back into the "fold." And then I hear Aaron's words . . . "You don't need an octopus, you don't need a gun . . . you need grain, oil and water, you need fire and a friend.

Your church, my church, doesn't need anything it doesn't already have to BE the church. We need to remember the simple things we were asked to do and do them week after week, year after year. We need to teach our children that God loves everything God has made. And, yes, that means God loves them too. We need to give our young people the opportunity to see and hear people as they get older, raise families, get sick, and even die. We need to remind ourselves that the "success" of our local congregation is not a big enough cause to excite a generation that really does want to see the Kingdom of God come "on earth as it is in heaven."

Punctuation matters.

I've been retired for three days. Right now it feels more like the beginning of the same sort of Summer vacation that I've mostly enjoyed for the past 22 years. In August, when most of the people I know head back to work it will feel different. I'll let you all know how when I get there.

For now, I'm trying to figure out what this new life is going to look like. I'm starting out with a two-part plan. I'm going to ride more (my bicycle(s) that is) and I'm going to write more. One piece of that part of the plan is this blog.

I've moved out of the last 22 years of campus ministry with a pile of thoughts, sermons, notes, questions and, just maybe, a few insights that need to be sorted, sifted, saved or shelved. I'm thinking that this might be the place for some of that to happen. Hence, the "title" of this workplace, "WHAT matters" 

The lack of punctuation in the title is not an oversight. It could be a question, as in, "I wonder what really matters?" or it could be a declaration, as in, "WHAT I spend my time thinking, writing and talking about really does matter. A dear friend and mentor of mine once said that as he got older there were fewer and fewer "hills" on which he was willing to die. And when he got really old, there were fewer and fewer "hills" he was even willing to climb. I'd like to climb the hills that matter.

So, I'll be focusing on the three "R's," I'll be reading, and riding, and wRiting and waiting to see how each shapes the next days of the journey