Proper 22 (27) 2006: "Boring gods for a Church Made Boring"

Proper 22 (27) 2006: "Boring gods for a Church Made Boring"
Job 1:1, 2:1-10; Psalm 26; Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12; Mark 10:2-16
Preached October 8th, 2006

North American Christianity has made an astounding achievement.

It is very, very difficult to make God, and Jesus, boring.

But we’re doing it.

We seem to be working terribly hard to strip Jesus of his divinity, and to make something less than a Lord of him. We seem to be trying awfully hard to turn a King into a pawn, and a lion into a domestic cat.

But Jesus is no pawn, he is a King; and keeping God to ourselves, within the church, is about as safe as keeping a lion as a house-pet.

There is no question in the mind of the author of Hebrews about the divinity of Christ, and by this divinity his Lordship. The author of Hebrews writes that Jesus is not just a man, but a man who is the very imprint of God, a man who is the reflection of God’s glory, a man who is more than a prophet. He is the Son of God, the heir and sustainer of all things, the one who existed with God before creation, and who suspends and sustains the creation through his word. Hebrews begins with the statement that “long ago God spoke through prophets . . . but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son,” and then that Jesus is “superior to the angels.”

Hebrews teaches us anything but a tame and boring Jesus. Hebrews teaches us about a Jesus as dangerous as divinity.

***

Because Jesus is something more than a prophet, and even more than the angels, this does not meant that prophetic utterances will cease to be valuable. They remain a way that God speaks to his people, and we will continue to read them in Church, and expound their meaning in sermons. The dawn of the Christian age does not obliterate the many and various ways that God speaks.

But prophetic utterances, and the many other ways that Gods speaks, will never be as valuable, or as terrifying, as what we have in Christ.

***

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas blames the theologians for making God so boring, and I agree with him. The theologians have helped us a whole lot in this effort to make God a house-pet.

Now don’t get me wrong. I love to read theology, and I have the bookstore bills to prove it. I’m no anti-intellectual, and Hauerwas himself is a theologian teaching at Duke University. When the intellectual life of the church is vibrant, it is a good and beautiful thing.

But I would say that our theologians have a bad habit of giving away what is ours, and when we follow amicably, we yield our territory to other masters, often without even a skirmish or a fight.

Christian theology and doctrine was once a discipline of the church, done by the church, but for the world. But it has become something private and hidden, and nearly meaningless to anyone outside a little circle that divides the private from the public, divides ourselves into pieces, and divides our church from the world.

We buy into this at our own peril. Our habit of yielding territory is harmful both to ourselves as persons, and to our communities of faith. Our retreat from the world, and our yielding territory to lords other than Christ, divides people into parts, leaving us, our very selves, broken into pieces. It’s strange that we are so comfortably and easily living under one rule in private, and another in public.

We may have become comfortable with this kind of personal division, but it is certainly not good for us. Historian Shirley Letwin, in her description of the 18th century gentleman, describes this phenomenon of the divided self and the gentleman’s ability to live with constancy rather than personal division. Letwin points to the damage we do to ourselves when we surrender one part of ourselves to one master, and another part of ourselves to another master. She writes that “when a man contradicts himself, he becomes an adversary of himself, and when he divides his life into separate compartments, he hides himself from himself and is only partly alive, like someone who walks in his sleep. Because a gentleman is aware of himself as engaged in shaping a coherent self, he would not do either.” Anytime we surrender just one part of our lives to Christ, and another part of our lives to another master, we are in fact doing harm to ourselves, as Letwin puts it, we become our own adversaries, and hardly even alive.

Letwin doesn’t go quite far enough, though, because we have not only surrendered parts of ourselves to a master other than Christ to another master, the church has surrendered another territory. When the church surrenders her witness to the world about the world we surrender our witness that Christ is already Lord over all things.

This is very bad for us. It has turned out to be very unhealthy for our communities of faith, and this is not only unhealthy in an instrumental sense. Our surrender of our witness to the world has not only meant declining numbers in most of the mainline churches, but more importantly, our lack of witness to the lordship of Christ over our entire lives, over the entirety of creation, and over the private and the public, we risk becoming something other than the church. We risk becoming a religious ghetto. And this worries me much, much more than mainline decline in Sunday attendance.

There is good news. Even though many of us are broken and divided people, at war with ourselves because we are serving more than one master, even though we are a church struggling to be herself, the good news is that this kind of division and lack of witness is a perversion of the Christian tradition and the Christian faith. Christ will never let us determine the boundaries and limits of his Lordship. Try as we might to keep the lion in the house, we will always fail to do so. There is no boundary that this dangerous God will respect.

The good news is that, beginning with Scripture, but processing through the councils that gave us the Nicene creed, through the reformation, and passing through us and into the future, the discipline of the church is a witness to the divinity of Christ, and by that to his Lordship. The Church’s witness is a claim that Christ is Lord over the entirety of our lives, a claim over the entire world, and a claim over the entire cosmos.

To put it simply, the Lord is already Lord over all, and we will remember this witness, simply because we will never be able to keep God as a house-pet. At a certain point you figure it out. Lions are not house-pets, and we are in danger whenever we keep a wild cat from his natural habitat.

This is daunting stuff, because it calls into question nearly every corner of our lives as persons, and our life as a people. The confession of the lordship of Christ propels us into a world where we cannot escape the haunting presence of a dangerous lion, a God free from whatever walls we think we build.

This is frightening because we are propelled into the world where Jesus is always in the corner of our eye, only to disappear when we turn our heads, always present even in his seeming absence.

This is simply what it is like for God to finally be free from the walls of the parish building.

And we are better off because of it, because when Jesus is no longer kept within only one part of our lives, we become whole people. We are better off because when Jesus is no longer kept within the boundaries of the church, we become faithful to the witness of the church throughout history. We are better off because deep in our heart we knew we couldn’t tame him anyway. We are better off because after this long time, living a boring life in a boring ghetto, by our confession of Christ’s divinity and of Christ’s Lordship over all, we become closer to alive.

And thankfully, God, and our life in him, might finally get whole lot more interesting.