Welcome to the second in our six-week sermon
series, “A Critical Conversation: Exploring the Church’s Harsh Reviews.” The idea is to take seriously the perspectives
of people who find churches out of touch with the real world, opposed to
science, overly political, hypocritical – and, this morning, people who find
churches to be judgmental and self-righteous.
For many of the 43 percent of Americans who are staying away from church,1
this describes the church they’re staying away from.
And hearing today’s readings, you might
see why some people associate “church” with judgment and
self-righteousness. I mean, the word
“sin” comes up nine times in the Scriptures we just heard. In the Acts reading, Peter lays it on the
line to people of Jerusalem, telling them they rejected “the Holy and Righteous
One,” Jesus, “and killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead.” He says, “Repent, therefore, and turn to God
so that your sins may be wiped out.” (Acts 3:14-15,19) The reading from the First Letter of John
says, “No one who abides in Jesus sins; no one who sins has either seen him or
known him” (3:6). I’m sure in many
churches using the Common Lectionary, the folks are hearing a nice diatribe on specific
sins in today’s world right about now.
If you’ve
encountered churches as judgmental and self-righteous, I’m sorry. There have been times in the Church’s
history, and certainly ugly moments on the nightly news, when supposedly
faithful people have been more than ready to point out the speck in someone
else’s eye while avoiding the log in their own.
Some of it’s just hating – a disfigurement of Jesus’ message of love,
beating up on other people out of bigotry and calling it “good news.” If you see self-proclaimed “Christians”
carrying protest signs saying that God hates some class of people – God’s own
children, by the way, people God created
– that’s all it takes for a lot of us to say, “No, thank you.”
That’s easy to understand. But most churches aren’t of the Fred Phelps variety, literally carrying signs of hate
into the world. I think the temptation
for churches more often is to imagine themselves as open and accepting while
unintentionally making some people feel excluded. In the Episcopal Church, for example, that
can sometimes manifest itself as the intolerance of the tolerant – the sense
that, if you don’t meet the litmus test of having no litmus tests, this may not
be the right community for you.
So for me, here’s the question. If we reject the notion that God’s always
looking for someone to condemn, how do we avoid going to the other
extreme? How do we keep from turning God
into a whole lot of nothing and making Jesus into a bland poster boy for “It’s
nice to be nice to the nice”? We talk a
lot about how the Episcopal Church is a “big tent,” a place where people who
differ in background and perspective can come together, an image of the
reconciled diversity of God’s good creation.
But, as Fr. Marcus and Mtr. Anne and I were discussing a few weeks ago,
don’t even big tents have walls? If the
risen Jesus isn’t interested in seeing the Church, his body in the world, being
an instrument of judgment for those who don’t toe the party line, then what does Jesus want the Church to be about?
I got a glimpse of at least one answer
from an unlikely source this week.
Driving back from Springfield after visiting my parents, I was listening
to All Things Considered on the
radio. And, in one of the rare moments
when they weren’t doing the annual
spring membership drive, there was a story about a new book from the columnist
David Brooks.2 The book’s
title is The Road to Character; and
in it, Brooks is contrasting a past collective mindset of humility with what he
calls our “culture of the Big Me,” a culture that celebrates the opinions and
accomplishments of the self. As a pundit
and a “recovering secularist,” Brooks has come to see himself as the epitome of
this cultural shift from humility to self-promotion. He says, he’s “paid
to be a narcissistic blowhard, to … appear more confident … than I really am,
to appear smarter than I really am, to appear … more authoritative than I
really am.” He’s come to see that he’s
been on a slippery slope toward judgmentalism and self-righteousness – a slippery
slope that churches would do well to watch for, too.
In contrast to a culture where he says we
“present the world with a highlight
reel” of our lives, Brooks’ new book tells the stories of historical figures who
came to “the turning point in a life toward maturity,” asking themselves, “‘What's
the weakness I have that leads to behavior I'm not proud of?’” In the stories of people like the social
activist Dorothy Day, civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, and President Dwight
Eisenhower, Brooks says he found a common element: that they each looked deeply into themselves,
confronted some core place of brokenness, and found a way to heal it. As Brooks said, “By the end of their lives,
they became strong in their weakest places.”
They managed to build characters that helped change the world. They avoided our more common temptation:
staking out positions without doing the hard, introspective, transformative
work of cultivating virtues – virtues like courage, honesty, and especially
humility. As Brooks says, “Character is
a way of living. It's not a series of positions you take.”
So
maybe that’s a lens to help us read Scripture like some of the readings we just
heard. In each of these readings,
there’s that hard word, the “S” word, the word that nice people like us don’t
like to use: Sin. For all the people who
are wired to point at others and wag their fingers and rail against things they
don’t like – for everyone who’s wired like that, there are those of us who are
wired to avoid the conflict entirely, nice people trying to be nice to the
nice. But still that word is there, with
a big letter “S” – Sin.
And
that big-letter-S kind of sin is what Jesus is concerned about, in Scripture
and in the ongoing life of the Body of Christ, the Church – the sin of
separating ourselves from relationship.
No matter our perspective – progressive, conservative, libertarian,
whatever – no matter our perspective, it’s easy to draw lines between what we
see as right and wrong and then find ourselves separated from each other
instead. Now, we can have great
conversations about specific issues – why one person thinks it’s sinful to
ignore carbon emissions and climate change, while another person thinks it’s sinful
to limit the productive capacity of business and industry. That’s a great
conversation. But we’re never going to
move past the art of dueling statistics and snarky catch phrases unless those
conversation partners come together in the virtues of honesty and humility,
recognizing their common brokenness first and foremost.
And
– even more important – recognizing their common redemption, too. Much to the
chagrin of political pundits and religious judges, we are not saved by getting the answers right. We are not
saved by pointing out how the other side misses the mark. We are saved, in the end, by following the
risen Christ who heals our sin. We are
saved by following Jesus, who comes to us with nail holes in his hands and
feet, gaping wounds that mark an astonishingly strong, life-giving, resurrected
body – a body real enough to eat a piece of fish but operating on a whole
different plane than our small world, a body that walks though doors that
everyone else finds to be locked.
We
are that body. We, the Church. We are the risen body of Christ in the world
– wounded, yes, but able to show the world a reality just beyond our
self-centeredness, able to practice the virtues that bring the kingdom of God
to life.
The
sin, the brokenness, the locked doors in our relationships with God and each
other – those don’t disappear either by condemning the other or by wishing our
differences away. We have to look at those
shut doors with our eyes wide open and then do the hard work of picking the
lock. We have to remember that each one of
us isn’t any more holy than the person with whom we disagree the most. We have to look to the examples of the saints
we’ve known to build the virtues through which we imitate Christ, to deepen
within our hearts the well of love that gives itself away.
And
we who love the Church have to cultivate a faith community in which honesty and
courage and humility guard us from the temptation to become the pundits of our
own small worlds. “Beloved, we are God’s
children now” the First Letter of John says.
“What we will be has not been revealed.
What we do know is this: When Jesus is revealed, we will be like him,
for we will see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2)
In the meantime, as we come to see the risen Christ more and more
clearly, our call is not to be judges but to be witnesses – witnesses of the power
of “repentance and forgiveness of
sins” (Luke 24:47), witnesses of the long, slow, hard work of characters built,
hearts transformed, and lives made new.
1.
Barna, George, and David Kinnaman.
Churchless: Understanding Today’s
Unchurched and How to Connect with Them.
Tyndale, 2014.
2.
“Take
It From David Brooks: Career Success ‘Doesn’t Make You Happy.’” All
Things Considered, April 13, 2015.
National Public Radio. Available
at: http://www.npr.org/2015/04/13/399391894/take-it-from-david-brooks-career-success-doesnt-make-you-happy. Accessed April 16, 2015.
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