Protecting Culture, or Projecting Christ

 

                We all tend to go to seminary thinking that studying theology will bring us closer to God.  But seminary is much more about forcing a conformity of thinking on students than it is about exploring what it means to live in relationship with a God Who is at the heart of things a Mystery.  Almost all of us when I was there struggled with this disconnect—how can studying to be a pastor for Christ have so little to do with our relationship to Christ?

                The answer, I think, is that seminary is much more interested in our being pastors who protect the established culture of the church than it is in our being pastors who follow Jesus.  The Reformation was a reaction to the church’s worship of itself as opposed to its submission to the living God; five hundred years on now, we should be much more sympathetic to the mother church.  We have fallen in the same hole—we now worship our own accretion of culture more than we worship the Christ who calls us to follow Him in newness of life.

                We do this because culture is stable, rigid, and powerful.  If culture is on our side, we are guaranteed some security and some comfort.  But that safety comes at a price—the walls that we rely on to keep what we are afraid of OUT are also the same walls that imprison us.  Culture inevitably becomes a prison for the human spirit—Jesus set us free to be a nomadic, pilgrim people, not a new empire.

                We have surrendered to the wrong god.

                And once surrendered to that god, it is devilishly hard to escape that surrender.  The church that emerges from the travails of this current time, this current crisis, will have to become a more pilgrim church than the stone piles that we have created will allow us to be.  How do we become people who embrace a call to be fully human, rather than a call to success, goodness, or some other culturally determined form of success?

                We have to surrender to the right God.

                Surrender to the right God transforms us from centripetal beings, where everything is sucked into the vortex of our conscious and unconscious whims, desires, thoughts, and feelings into centrifugal beings, where every thought, desire, feeling, whim is transformed into love and pulled out of us and pushed in the direction of the other person.  Surrender to Christ can only really be accomplished by the death of that centripetal force within us—our will, our sense of our self at the center of all things.  When that dies, Christ raises a new self built not on what comes into us, but what comes out of us. 

                You cannot protect culture and project Christ, any more than you can love another person and simultaneously demand something from them.    The demand transforms love into another transaction.  Protecting culture reveals our deeper need for safety which makes our desire to escape self a shallower lie.  God is judging the church, setting it right, by removing the choice to retreat into a safe culture and find survival there.  Survival will only come by surrender to the God revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  We pastors must lead God’s people there by example, and then by projecting the resurrection love of Jesus Christ into our congregations.  We must let culture go and embrace the dangerous and unnavigable journey of taking Christ’s hand and going where we do not wish to go.  Only then will the church cease to be a football, a weapon, a mascot in the control of any race, class, or group, and once again become the place where all those lesser allegiances bow at the feet of the Lord of the world, Jesus Christ.

The Dangers of Being Good, and Being Right

 

                We church people tend to be the folks who were too cautious or afraid to step too far out of the lines that authorities in our lives drew.  We leaned on those authorities for protection from our peers who dared to do what we did not dare to do, and came to rely on those authorities for our own validation.  We gloried in being right—having the right answer, getting the right grade, being praised by the authority figures in our lives. 

                Everyone of us hunts for this praise, this validation.  We look in different places for it, but most of us begin our adult lives thinking it is outside of us.  The danger for Christians, and especially for pastors, is to realize too slowly that this search outside of ourselves is not only fruitless, but destructive to Christ’s purposes in the world.  Authorities seek to reproduce themselves, and thus use their power to replicate in the next generation the power structures that they inherited.  It is why such authorities reward “right thinking” and behavior that reinforce those power structures and punish “wrong thinking” and its consequent behaviors.   It is a very short trip of aging from being one who pleases authorities to becoming an authority who demands that he/she needs to be pleased.

                Most of us pastors fall in love early in life with being good, and thus fall in line with the institutional authorities that teach us to be right, and to reward “good/right” and to seek to punish “bad/wrong”.  This is the basic structure of all worldly power.

                It is impossible to read this reward and punishment rhythm in the life of Jesus revealed in the New Testament.  Jesus teaches a way of love that has nothing to do with using external authorities to prop up one’s sense of self.  Jesus preaches and demonstrates in his life, death and resurrection that  fear, which lurks behind all forms of punishment, cannot guide us into Truth.  We wake too late to the fact that power cannot give us what we seek, and that spiritual authority is not power in any worldly sense. 

                The Church as it exists in the West, including the Presbyterian Church (USA), is dying—poisoned by its trust in worldly power, and its lack of trust in the path that the Lord of the Church, Jesus Christ, lays out for us.  The younger generations’ anger behind the charge that we are hypocrites is not because we say one thing and do another—that is true of almost all people.  The rage our hypocrisy generates comes from our betrayal of Jesus through the violence, dehumanization and harm that we do in the name of a Lord and a God who we claim IS love.  They hate us because we trust the power of fear more than we trust the power of love.

                I am wrong.  I am bad, by any definition of that term.  I can confess this because my defense is in Christ, who knows how wrong I am, how bad I am, better than I do.  And Jesus Christ truly loves me.  But to fully receive that love, I have to let go of all the prideful lies that I use to hide my badness, my wrongness.  Expose my wrongness, my badness, and you have not shown Jesus anything He didn’t already know about me—and Jesus Christ loves me.  What punishment can hurt what Christ has healed?

                There are no good girls or boys in Jesus Christ’s presence.  No one standing behind the armor of argument or position or power is there.  We are defenseless before the world, because Love has not fought against the powers of death, it has swallowed them and rendered them of no consequence.  Death is not defeated by armor or weapons—Paul says purposely that death is taken into God’s own self-- it is swallowed up in victory.

                If I have to choose between loving another soul and being right, I will choose the soul every time, no matter what it costs.  It is what Jesus Christ has done for me.      Let go of being right and being good.