OUR BEST HOPE

A blessed Holy Week to you all. May you emerge from this week as more determined and hopeful than ever for a changed world.

GK Chesterton once wrote, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” May we consider doing the difficult? For the sake of the world?

Something’s Gotta Give

We look to Easter aware that our world is terribly divided and broken. That’s not new to human existence. It’s just that the headlines underscoring the age-old stubborn human dilemma tell of these particularly perilous days in which we live. Another mass shooting and then another. Jim Crow renewal in Georgia and elsewhere. More dire warnings about unmitigated climate change. A divided, contentious, and gridlocked congress. News and lies. Hate crimes. Refugees at our borders and displacements around the world. The widening wealth gap. White supremacy and whiteness as a defining cultural ideology. And, of course, COVID-19 and its carnage, and vaccinations notwithstanding, the questions of whether we will ever return to normalcy. In the words of Jack Nicholson in his 2003 film, Something’s Gotta Give.

In the stance of a good Old Testament prophet who knows that the present order cannot stand, I appeal to that community I know best – the church. Without fully retelling my own personal story of call, a great awakening happened in me when I left a business world of global engagement and entered seminary. From the time of that decision and through 32 years of ordination in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, I continue to cling to the notion that the church is the community which offers our best (and only?) hope for the world. It is the only vision I know for a restored world.

A Church in Its Own Way

Yet, to be totally frank, I do not wear rose colored glasses when viewing the church. You who know me are aware that I have had a lifetime of a lover’s quarrel with the church. I have seen how the sausage is made. I have not seen a lack of theology, thoughtful and inspiring sermons, or good faithful service to the church being done by good people. What I do see is a church that struggles to get out of its own way, mainly because it is still confused about its identity and calling. That confusion is the biggest symptom of the church’s hangover from the deal it made with the devil when Emperor Constantine (4th Century) thought, for reasons of self-preservation, the marriage of the church and the empire was a good idea.

From Top-Down Command-and-Control to a Grassroots Movement

My pre-seminary life of witnessing an imperialistic approach to foreign aid and my 25 years of grassroots efforts in Haiti have confirmed to me what persons more informed than I have already said. Top-down approaches have never worked to bring about transformation. (For example, see Dead Aid: Why Aid is not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa by Dambisa Moyo, or Toxic Charity by Robert D. Lupton, or The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly.) It is the same with the church. Because of its marriage with empire the church has in its DNA an inherent top-down orientation, complete with command-and-control approaches to its life, as well as a number of programs that are to both help people and garner people’s attention, cementing its authority. When the empire influence became especially insidious, it spawned a tragic result that I called “Malignant Christianity.” For more on this and how we can be saved from it, see my June 2020 blog - https://www.rightspirit.org/blog/2020/6/9/being-saved-from-malignant-christianity.

When the women first ran from the tomb and declared it empty, the very first sermon was quite simple, “He is not here. He is risen.” From that proclamation a new community was formed. It was a grassroots community that was the continuation and embodiment of Jesus in the world. Jesus, in the Gospel of John, called the church his “branches.” As an arborist knows, the vine and the branch have the same DNA. Paul used the term, “The Body of Christ,” to describe the church. This new community in its very essence was to be counter-cultural to the status quo. Its life as a contrast society – in the world and not of it – was its witness. Its life together was to be an imitator of the crucified and risen Jesus. Caesar was not Lord. Jesus was.

Making the World Right

I do not want to overly romanticize the early church, but its call to be the light of the world and to be salt and leaven is a corporate call. Yes, Jesus does make the individual call of denying self and following him (Mark 8:34 et al). However, the call to find life rather than losing it is a call to the common good everyone must discern. That is, to live out in a community and participate in its life together for the sake of the world that God so richly loves. And for the church to be the body it is baptized to be, the most important fundamental shift it needs to make is from individualism to corporate witness. The fullest corporate expression is the same as that of the courageous, death-defeating, sinner-embracing, radical and extravagant-loving Jesus. As his body, the church bears Jesus’ focus – the poor, the powerless, the disenfranchised, the broken-hearted, all captured in the call to “do justice” (Micah 6:8). In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus proclaims at his baptism his coming to “fulfill all righteousness” (Mt. 3:15), and at his signature Sermon on the Mount announces blessings to those who “hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Mt. 5:6). Righteousness is about justice, making things “right.” And folks, things are not right.

From American Individualism to a Mission for the Common Good

Perhaps the most stubborn aberration of American Christianity is the unchecked individualism that it not only fails to fully challenge but that it also reinforces. Protecting “my personal rights” and “my person freedom” is central to the American creed. Never mind that individual rights are not a biblical theme. How in the world does American Individualism square with this early Christian hymn?

Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
   did not regard equality with God
   as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
   taking the form of a slave,
   being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
   he humbled himself
   and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.

- Philippians 2:4-8

To fully appreciate this startling passage, the original Greek is helpful. First there is an individual appeal to each member of the body. Do not look after your own interests. What?!?! But rather look to the common good of all. Then the hymn switches to a corporate exhortation. Let the same mind, church, be in you (plural) that was in Christ Jesus.

Five Moves Towards Repairing the World

For the church to become a grassroots effort that changes the world in this time of great crises, I suggest some starts here. There are five:

1) Start recovering the essential marks of fidelity to Jesus and his gospel as being community spirituality, the collective life and witness of a community. This includes not only what the community stands for, but how it is that they live their lives and in whom they place their ultimate trust. Virtually every promise and call in the New Testament is in the plural, not the singular. Even the call of the disciples is a call to a community. When Jesus proclaims that we are to be the salt, leaven, and light of the world, it is a communal calling.

This would mean reimaging how we approach the whole idea of discipleship. It is almost universally true that every congregation who has a Minister for Discipleship also has a number of programs to help individuals become disciples. The focus needs to be placed on the body itself being a corporate witness and being a force for the common good in all aspects of the crises we face – white supremacy, climate, gun violence, poverty, refugees, etc. Alluding to the words of GK Chesterton, let’s do the “difficult” as a body.

2) Start challenging and debunking the notion of substitutionary atonement as what happened on Good Friday. The fallacy that there is a punishment-seeking, angry God that transforms Jesus into a scapegoat only fuels the individual decision salvation theology that infects American Christianity. I recently learned of a young man in one of my previous youth groups who made the tragic decision to take his own life. His distraught mother went searching around the community looking for some words that could speak to her deep pain. When she asked a Roman Catholic priest if her son “was in heaven,” the priest said that was up to God to decide. The priest left it at that. What the priest and every minister of the gospel should have said is, “Yes, that decision is God’s, and God has already decided. That is why Jesus went to the cross and would not stay dead. And besides, Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the poor in Spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’” For every religious huckster who tries to turn the cross into some sort of individual salvation deal the authentic church needs to declare what the Spirit revealed to the new church on Pentecost. God has already decided. God has already overcome whatever would crush us, fragment us, or cheapen us. The only decision with which we are left is about how we will now reorder our lives and what we will do together now that God has already done it all for us. So, stop the salvation games.

3) Kill whatever “program” mentality the congregation may have. The church is not a collection of “programs.” God is not a program. The church is a body of people. Start focusing on what the congregation must do to shape the body into one that aspires to be the heart, hands, and feet of Jesus in the world.

4) Stop the insanity with perpetuating the fallacy that the church is not supposed to be political. Jesus was highly political. Jesus’ march into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday was a protest march. Jesus took on the powers at be, whether it was the corrupt religious establishment of the day or the civil leaders. Our pastors and leaders face a dilemma. In this highly contentious climate in which we try to be church, pastors are often under siege. If they do speak to the real sins of our society in specific forms (i.e., racism, white supremacy, gun violence, voting rights et al), they put themselves and their families at risk, often great risk. Their bishops get calls from angry parishioners. The angry withhold their support or even leave. Too often the pastor is forced to resign. I am more convinced than ever that the main cause for mental health issues among our precious leaders is their own awareness of the stakes of being forthright and the fears that hold them back. I do not have easy answers for this, except to say that pastors who find themselves under siege and attack know that they serve the One who himself was attacked and crucified (cf. Philippians 2 above). When threatened, it is good to remember the most frequent command in the New Testament? Do not be afraid.

5) Be intentional about living proleptically. Prolepsis means to live in the midst of our own lives and in the midst of history while already knowing the outcome. Love and life do win. If that day is surely coming, where there are no more tears, no more hunger, no more exclusion, no more violence, suffering, and death; if one day this broken, fragmented, hurting world is fully restored; if because death has been defeated, we no longer need to resort to self-preservation; and, if the ultimate promises of God are true; then, let’s get on with it! Let’s do the difficult! It’s our best hope.

I beg you (church) to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called.

- Ephesians 4:1

In the abiding hope of the empty tomb,