First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
18 April 2004
Making a Case for Jesus?
There's a lot of good preaching material in the gospel lesson assigned for today—there's the theme of faith and doubt, something we liberal Christians are quite familiar with. We like doubt. Doubt, we say, is good and necessary. It strengthens faith. It is (as someone, not me, once said) "the ants in the pants of faith." Forgiveness is in there, and the peace of Christ. We have heard a lot about these things too—the undeserved love, the wholeness that fills the earth with well-being. Whose sick heart could not use a big dose of both today? What unpayable debts in our revengeful world would not welcome such forgiveness? What hard, violent city would not eagerly soak up that peace?
Good stuff, indeed. But instead of dwelling on the reading from John today, I want to talk about the first scripture reading from the Acts of the Apostles, because it proposes something that is unfamiliar and way out of our Congregationalist comfort zone—it shows us the work of Christian evangelism. It asks us to make a case for Jesus.
The story takes place after Pentecost. The newly-emboldened apostles have already been in jail once for preaching about Jesus, but they've been sprung from their prison by an angel of the Lord, or so the story goes, and have hurried right back down to the federal building to preach again. In this episode, then, they are appearing in court for a second time, and this time the authorities decide not to be overly-repressive. They pragmatically adopt a policy of benign neglect, hoping that this new sect, this Jesus-agitation, might eventually just lose steam and die. Even so, the cops rough the apostles up a bit and order them never again to say Jesus' name in public.
A lot of good that did. "God raised Jesus," the apostles kept preaching, "who was crucified. God has made him Leader and Savior. Because of him, God is granting forgiveness of sins to us and to you. We are witnesses to these things. We are telling the truth. The Holy Spirit is also a witness to them (by which they mean that their message is accompanied by real power to change people's lives). We urge you to believe our message about Jesus and to join our fellowship! If you do, you will have life!"
Their message was simple, direct, joyful and confident. And nearly all the apostles eventually ended up in jail again because they persisted in sharing it.
Another day we will sermonize more about Christianity as a jailhouse religion. For now it is enough to recall that most of its best people, starting with Jesus, have seen the inside of a cell. Some of you have too, maybe back in the 60's and 70's, when many believers resisted racism and protested war and poverty. So many went to jail that comic Dick Gregory predicted a day when having gone to jail for justice would be required for election to public office. We wish…. Today people are more likely to focus on whether a candidate inhaled, or whether his bishop is going to bar him from taking communion.
Dr. King went to jail. Henry David Thoreau went to jail. (He refused to pay taxes to support a war. Ralph Waldo Emerson went to see him. He asked, "What are you doing in there, Henry?" Thoreau replied, "Well, Ralph, what are you doing out there)?" John the Evangelist was exiled on Patmos for not keeping quiet about Jesus. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed in a Nazi prison for trying to kill Hitler, which (believe it or not) was another way of not keeping quiet about Jesus. Nelson Mandela was isolated on Robbens Island for inciting violence against apartheid—ditto. The Berrigan brothers, along with a slew of Sisters, sat for years in Danbury for speaking about Jesus. They did it by pouring their own blood on a few of our country's weapons of mass destruction.
We sing a song at Jazz 5:30 that begins, "I'm gonna do what the Spirit says do!" It continues by substituting, "I'm gonna sing when the Spirit says, 'Sing!'" Then, "dance," then "pray ," etc. You know how songs like these go. The last verse says "I'm goin' to jail when the Sprit says 'jail'." I belt that verse out too, everybody does, but I don't mean it. Jail scares me, and from what I hear about jail, it ought to. Thank God it is not every Christian's particular calling to go to jail; I don't want you to get the impression that it is required for being a good one. What I do want us to think about this morning, however, is the big clue we get in this passage to the way in which that brave, defiant and oft-imprisoned early church got its start, and how it grew. We always say that we want First Church to grow and to thrive. So we should pay attention now to what comes next.
How did that very first First Church begin? How did it grow? Our reading from Acts says that it was by confident, joyful and persistent preaching about Jesus, and by extending a confident, urgent invitation to others to believe in him, to be changed by that faith, and to join the fellowship of believers in his name.
This is difficult for us. We mainline liberal Christians do not usually think of our faith as being primarily about Jesus, nor do we generally start with him when we talk about our church. We tend to think that faith is something you do, and that church (as Tony Robinson has written) is the place where you come to get your assignment for the week—You, work on your sexism! You, work on your anger! You, remember that God has no hands but your hands! You, organize that letter-writing campaign, and all of you, go fix the world! Jesus' teaching is our inspiration, it is the jumping off point for all this activity, but it's not usually him we talk about "out there." Once we're off and running, we tend not to mention his name.
It is now a commonplace observation that the membership of most mainline liberal Christian churches has shrunk remarkably over the last thirty years. We know that we have lost practically an entire generation of young people. Now, I'm not saying there's any one cause for this loss, nor any quick fix. It's a sociologically and theologically complicated phenomenon, and to suggest that the failure to place Jesus front and center is the reason we're in this pickle is not altogether right. But as a pastor and a believer, our current situation does make me at least wonder if the way we do things now, with only a glancing reference to Jesus, is not mixed up in it somehow. I wonder if it the best we can do.
Or the best we ought to do. I ask myself if it is fully faithful to the Gospel itself, which, when push comes to shove, is hard to pin down about the correctness of particular courses of ethical action in the world and does not really yield a coherent politics, but presents us instead at every turn with a way, a truth and a life that has a name, that is in fact a person—Jesus of Nazareth. The New Testament witness repeatedly invites us to know, love, follow and obey him, not just as one of many wise men from the past whose teachings instruct and inspire us, but as a living and a saving Lord. The New Testament witness invites and urges us and to share what we know and have experienced of him with everyone, inviting and urging others to enter his fellowship and to be changed by the power of his Spirit.
Invite. Urge. Share. Jail is not a requirement for being a Christian, no; but if we credit the New Testament, commending Jesus to others and sharing his fellowship with them is. Do we do this? Most of us go a whole lifetime without doing it even once.
A few summers ago, the Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, Will Willimon, was speaking to a group of Christians north of the border, members of the rough Canadian equivalent of our UCC. His text was the famous passage in which Jesus tells the disciples that he is calling them to follow him and to fish for people. Someone in the audience asked him, "Do you think that we ought to try to convert people to Christianity?" He said, "Sure. Go ahead, give it a try. Of course, since you are the United Church of Canada, it probably won't work, but go for it!"
They hadn't liked his talk much to begin with. They liked it less after that reply. To suggest that Christians should try to persuade others to be Christians seemed to them arrogant, imperialist, pushy, exclusivistic, tastelessly evangelical, anti-modern. But, Willimon says, the assumption behind the question, "Are we supposed to be converting people to Christianity?" demands examination. The assumption is that "you've got these innocent, untainted North Americans wandering around, then you've got these pushy, arm-twisting Christians who want to corral everybody and convert them to their narrow, culturally-bound point of view."
Yet surely (Willimon goes on to say) one thing we've learned in this post-modern age is that "everyone has a point of view, everybody stands somewhere, everyone has been baptized into some culture." It may be the culture that we celebrate here on Sundays, or the culture of consumerism, or the culture of ubiquitous communication and short attention spans, or the culture of hyper-patriotic militarism. "Everyone has already or is daily being been converted into something." So the issue for the person "out there" is not "Are they going to convert me into a pushy, arm-twisting culture?", but rather (he writes) "Which pushy, arm-twisting culture is going to have its way with my life?"
Willimon told the Canadians that he could not see why Christians should (in the name of pluralism, respect, tolerance and the separation of church and state, or what have you) "abandon everybody in Nova Scotia to the clutches of late twentieth century North American capitalism." Why not go ahead, "put our stuff on the table, argue, demonstrate that Jesus really has the capacity to make human beings more interesting than The Spice Girls, and see who's left standing at the end?"
Over there across the Common from us, Harvard College has strict rules about religious proselytizing on campus. The theory behind these rules is that if you can prevent religious people from putting the make on everyone, then there will be no campus religious conflict, and everyone, from Anabaptists to Hindus to Wiccans to Zoroastrians, will be able to practice their faith in peace. These rules have a very good intention with which I fully concur—nobody wants nor should have to be subjected to the relentless psychological and spiritual pressure that some religious people have raised to an art form in order to win converts.
Willimon says that years ago Duke toyed with imposing similar rules, but desisted in the end. The officials there understood that on an academic campus, just as in, say, the economic and political realms, it's not just religions that attempt to persuade! "Everybody is in the proselytizing business," he writes, "trying to put the make on everybody else," not just those zealots in Women's Studies, and Botany. "It's all about conversion, baptism, persuasion, enlightenment, so why should mainline liberal Christians exclude themselves from the transformative fun?"
I would not go so far as to ask us to "proselytize." That word is too laden with scary, invasive and coercive overtones. Respect for others requires us to be non-invasive, non-coercive, non-violent. Jesus requires us to be non-invasive, non-coercive and non-violent. Not once did he do anything other than simply tell people the story of God, offer people the mercy of God, and invite people into fellowship, to prepare for the kingdom of God. But to refrain from coercive "proselytizing" does not mean that we should obey those cops who beat up the apostles and told them never to speak of Jesus in the public square, never to tell anyone the good news of what God is doing in him for us, and for all.
Respect for others cannot possibly mean—can it?—that we should refrain from trying to imagine a way of life "more powerful and life-giving than the one offered by the Pentagon, AMWAY, Toys R Us" or even by Harvard College; and not only to imagine such a culture, but also to propose it, to make truth claims for it, and to invite others to consider it and share in it with us? If we love the Good News we will want to share its joy with whomever will listen. At some point in our Christian maturity, then, as individuals and as a church, we must find ourselves "excited about the opportunity to offer others, in word and deed, the truth that we have found, the truth that has found us, in Jesus Christ."
Our congregation will not grow and thrive simply by warmly welcoming people who have set out to find us here on the corner of Mason and Garden, people who already know what we stand for and feel comfortable walking through our doors. We won't grow simply by adding to our numbers Christians who are know Jesus and are persuaded – sheep from other Christian flocks who have become unhappy with their current churches, for example, or who have moved to Cambridge from other cities and are looking for a new church home.
Our congregation will grow and thrive if and when we go out and share our faith with people who do not know, who have never heard the news that the love of God is embodied in a crucified and risen man, Jesus of Nazareth; that he lived, ministered, died and rose so that they might believe that they are loved beyond telling; that mercy and forgiveness, peace and wholeness can come to them as freely and as fully as it has come to us, who are his undeserving disciples; and that a grateful, joyful, and forgiven fellowship is gathered here on this corner in Cambridge by his grace, and that it is a fellowship ready and eager to welcome them in his name and to serve the world for his sake.
© 2004, J Mary Luti