SERMONS

By Rev. Anthony B. Robinson
Sabbatical Interim Minister
October 11, 2009

Hebrews 4: 12 – 16

My time with you as Sabbatical Interim Minister is winding down. After this Sunday, we have two more Sundays together. Next week is our Blessing of the Animals service. I hope you will bring your pets, although our cat, who seems to be more of Zen Buddhist, has thus far declined my invitation. If you do bring your pets, leave them in the car for the first part of the service. At 11:15 or so, we will move out to the playground for the blessing of the animals. At that time, you’ll be able to go get them. And the Sunday after that is my last in the pulpit. Angela will re-join us that Sunday, as a member of the congregation. Won’t it be great to see her? The following Sunday, November 1, will be her first time to preach and lead worship.

So with my days numbered I want to focus on a question and a concern that has come to loom large for me. It is suggested by the title of my sermon, “Isn’t Christianity about Being Good?” Early in the week, when I began thinking about this sermon I thought that I would try to get my arms around something I care about but haven’t addressed as yet. But I’m not sure that’s true. As I think about it, I’ve probably worked these questions and themes into many of my sermons. So rather than breaking new ground, perhaps I am doing more of a summing up, a focusing of a core message.

To get at this, let me report to you a bit from my work with a host of congregations across the country and in Canada. In doing this work I have often had an experience that happened again just last Saturday. I led a retreat for a UCC congregation here in the Seattle area.

I had asked the people, as you often do at these things, to spend some time in small groups discussing the material I had presented. In reporting back after the small groups, one congenial, interesting man, a retired professor of psychology it turned out, said, “We wonder if our church is still God-centered?” He didn’t say it with hostility, though there was urgency to the question. He said that in their group they found themselves wondering “What is our center? How does all this hang together? Are we a God-centered church?”

That question, a really good one, was outside the scope of the retreat and the topic which I been asked to address. So, I did not do more than acknowledge it.

But it’s an experience that I’ve had often in congregations of the mainline Protestant churches as I teach and consult. Something very similar happened during a leadership retreat for a congregation in the Berkeley, California area. At one point, a mid-30′s aged woman, a newer member of the church blurted out, “But what do we believe? That’s what I want to know?” People were a little startled, but then another person, also a younger woman, jumped in saying, “I feel we’re not sure who we are or what we believe.”

Before long, an older man, a longtime member of the congregation, quelled the disturbance and the questions. Somewhat gruffly he said, “Attempts to define what we believe make me nervous.” His comment was not without irony. While speaking in the name of tolerance and open-mindedness, he put the lid on the discussion.

I can’t tell you how many times over the last five years, this kind of thing has come up in the congregations with which I have worked. There is sense, in such congregations, of a vacuum at the center, of something missing. It’s not that these churches aren’t full of activities and worthy endeavors. Generally they are busy and active congregations.

But when in a retreat setting people step back a bit, a question that seems to come bubbling to the surface is something on the order of “What’s the center? How does all this activity fit together?” “Is there something deeper?” And, “What do we believe?”

Such questions led me to write a book several years ago titled, “What’s Theology Got to do With It?” I try in it to explore the intersections between the core convictions of Christian faith and congregational health and vitality.

In today’s Scripture lesson from Hebrews the author urges, “Let us hold fast to our confession.” The whole sentence in which those words appear is, “Since, then, we have a great high priest, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession.” The confession he means is our “confession” of faith, our core of conviction about God, about who God is and what God has done.

When people in congregations raise their questions about the center, the core of belief and conviction, it’s not always an easy thing to do. Such voices risk being dismissed, as in the Berkeley church, where in the name of openness and tolerance, a person with some evident clout said, “Attempts to define what we believe make me nervous.” That was the end of that.

Or someone may say, “Here, in our church, people are free to believe whatever they want;” end of discussion. Well, clearly respect for freedom of individual conscience is an important value, but somehow it seems extreme when it rules out authentic questions or makes it difficult to ask, “What is it that Christians believe?”

Other times such questions are dismissed or ruled out of order by the assertion that Christianity is simply about being or doing good, serving the neighbor in need and working for justice. “That’s what matters,” someone may say, as if that settles it. Well, it does matter. But especially in a world where people search, sometimes desperately, for meaning and truth, the capacity to discuss and share faith, theology and convictions also matters.

One way to describe the problem is that ethics, how we are to live and treat others, seems to have become separated from theology, our beliefs about and our experience of God. Or, more, ethics has eclipsed theology, so that Christianity is simply about doing good.

A slightly different way to put this is to say that salvation has been re-defined as a sociological reality. It has to do with being and becoming a particular kind of community or society, rather than salvation being a theological reality, something that is about God, who God is and what God has done and the difference such things make.

I realize these are fairly abstract ways of describing the concern or challenge. On the ground it comes down to the question that is the title of the sermon, “Isn’t Christianity really about being good?” Or, alternatively, “Isn’t Christianity really about being loving?” The answer, I believe, and you may disagree with me, is “No, Christianity isn’t really simply about being good.” Christianity is really about God’s revelation in Jesus Christ.

In last Sunday’s New York Times there was a review of a new book by Karen Armstrong. Perhaps some of you know her work? Armstrong is a former nun turned prolific popular historian and theologian. The reviewer has many positive things to say about Armstrong’s newest book, and her thesis that faith is really a continual search for an ultimately unknowable God. This is known as “apophatic” theology, which means God can only known by what God is not. A statement like, “God is unknowable,” would be an example of the wisdom of this approach.

But listen to the concluding words of the review, “Apophatic religion may be the most rigorous way to go in search of an elusive God. But for most believers, it will remain a poor substitute for the idea that God has come in search of us.” “That God has come in search of us.”

Those words are really a beautiful summation of the gospel and at the core of a Christian confession of faith: that in Jesus Christ God has come in search of us. God does not stand far off, a distant, unmoved mover. In Jesus Christ God comes to us, seeking we who have gone astray and who, left to ourselves, remain lost.

Listen to today’s Scripture, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are.”

The gospel is not, in the end, about our search for an elusive God, Neither is it about our attempts to be good. It is about the God who has come in search of us. It is about our high priest who understands us because he’s been where we are.

Jesus is our great high priest who has passed through the heavens to sit at the right hand of God, but not before he walked on and suffered through this earth, this life.

So our confession is, in part, that there is absolutely no temptation with which you or I wrestle, there is no pain that you bear, there is no dark, lonely path that you walk that he has not walked before.

The good news is not about our search for an elusive God, but about God’s search for us in Jesus Christ. It is about the power of God and the mercy of God. Assured of this, that we have a high priest who knows our every situation, Hebrews says, “Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”

“Boldness.” Is there boldness to our faith? Often today it seems to me that the church has lost boldness, has lost confidence to declare we have a great high priest, that there is a balm in Gilead, and that there is healing for the sin-sick soul, that while we were yet helpless, God has come in Christ in search of us.

When people exclaim, “We wonder if our church is God-centered?” or “I don’t think we know what we believe, where our center is,” or, as it was put to me in another congregation, “I’m not sure we quite how to say it, but I think it’s this: we long to be in the presence of the living God.” Saying these things we are asking for something more and deeper than Christianity being solely about us and how we are to act. They are asking for a message about or from God. Jesus Christ is that message, that word of God, that word from God for the salvation of us all.

Now it may be that such questions and concerns are not ones that you share? That’s okay. As I said in beginning, my time is winding down, so today I’m working on something that concerns me. If it’s important to you, more’s the better; if not, I’ll be out of your hair soon enough.

But I would also say that such questions seem to me urgent for the mainline Protestant churches, whose continued decline has something, perhaps a great deal, to do with not, “Holding fast to our confession.” That is to say the lack of boldness and vitality is related to the absence of central conviction about God and God’s revelation which I have heard voiced in so many congregations.

If this analysis is at all accurate, what has led us to this place? This has come to pass for a number of complex reasons, some of them quite possibly good reasons, or certainly, understandable reasons.

One such reason has to do with the alliance of Christianity and right wing politics. In the recent decades, and particularly during the Bush administration, many more mainline Christians became dismayed and ill-at-ease with that way that other Christians virtually equated the agenda of the Republican Party with the Christian faith. Partly in response to that development many mainline and some evangelical Christians came to speak of themselves as “Progressive Christianity.” That has been helpful in some ways, and it’s been coming from a good place. The difficulty has been, as I said earlier, progressive Christianity often seems only about us, about ethics. It has little to say about God, about theology. In fact, the agenda of many theological progressives has largely been one of casting doubt on historic Christian confessions.

The alliance of politics and religion by the right wing is not the only understandable reason for backing off, for failing to hold fast to a Christian confession. Partly too it has been a response to the emergence of a much more religiously pluralistic America, one where people of other faiths–Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jew–are our neighbors and friends, as are people of no religious faith. We have been concerned, rightly, to respect the faiths of others. I’m not sure, however, that the way to respect others faith is to mute or diminish our own.

Beyond all these, the alliance of some Christians with right-wing politics, the emergence of religious pluralism, there may be another hesitation, another, a further, reason that diminishes a bold confession of faith in Christ.

I mentioned in a sermon this summer. Embarrassment. It’s a little embarrassing for modern, self-sufficient, hard-working achievers to talk about a need for help, for saving, for a Savior. But the core here is the insight, one we don’t have sufficient time, to develop that Sin is not just mistakes or discreet acts, it is Power that distorts and disfigures us all. That human nature is distorted and that we are all in some real sense in bondage to Sin’s power. That human nature needs a savior. We prefer to think we are in charge, and can manage just fine.

An expression of this confidence, a more American version of the gospel may be, “God helps those who help themselves.” “Isn’t that,” someone will assert, “what the Bible says?” Actually, no, it’s not what the Bible says. Nowhere in Scripture can the words, “God helps those who help themselves be found.” What Scripture does say is just the opposite, that God helps the helpless. We are assured that Jesus did not refuse to help the helpless. Not, “God helps those who help themselves,” but “Help of the helpless, O abide with me.”

I was raised in the liberal, mainline Protestant tradition. In that tradition Jesus was understood as a teacher and an example. I benefited greatly from that tradition and will remain forever indebted to it. But like all traditions, all interpretations, it has its own limits and blind spots. In it, we were to be givers, but not receivers. We were to serve God, but not so much to need God. We were to do and be active, but not to wait, to wait upon the Lord.

In that strong and noble tradition, acknowledging our own need for God was just a little embarrassing. Christianity was mainly about being good. This tradition had strengths, but it tended to devolve into a humanism that did not address the darkest depths of sin and evil, which in this world so regularly confront anyone whose eyes are open. It did not address our own need for a power greater than our own.

In Donald Miller’s book Blue Like Jazz he tells the story a folksinger told at a concert, a story about his friend who was a Navy SEAL.

The folksinger said his friend was performing a covert operation, freeing hostages from a building in some dark part of the world. His friend’s team flew in by helicopter, made their way to the compound and stormed into the room where the hostages had been imprisoned for months. The room was filthy and dark. The hostages were curled up in a corner, terrified. When the SEALs entered the room, they heard the gasps of the hostages. They stood at the door and called to the prisoners telling them they were Americans. The SEALs asked the hostages to follow them, but the hostages wouldn’t. They sat there on the floor and hid their eyes in fear. They were not of healthy mind and didn’t believe their rescuers were really Americans.

“The SEALs stood there, not knowing what to do. They couldn’t possibly carry every one out. One of the SEALs, the folksinger’s friend, got an idea. He put down his weapon, took off his helmet, and curled up tightly next to the other hostages getting so close his body was touching some of theirs. None of the prison guards would have done this. He stayed there for a little while until some of the hostages started to look at him, finally meeting his eyes. The Navy SEAL whispered that they were Americans there to rescue them. Will you follow us? He said. The hero stood to his feet and one of the hostages did the same, then another, until all of them were willing to go. The story ends with the hostages safe on an aircraft carrier.”

Don Miller concludes by saying, “I never liked when preachers said we had to follow Jesus. Sometimes they would make him sound angry. I liked the story the folksinger told, of Jesus becoming human, so that we would be able to trust Him, and I like that He healed people and loved them and cared deeply about how people were feeling.

“When I understood that the decision to follow Jesus was very much like the decision the hostages had to make to follower their rescuer, I knew then I needed to decide whether or not I would follow Him. The decision was simple once I asked myself, Is Jesus the Son of God, are we being held captive in a world run by Satan, a world filled with brokenness, and I do I believe Jesus can rescue me from this condition?”

“Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”