July 23, 2006 - Christianity: A Life, Not an Identity

16th Sunday in Ordinary Time
23 July 2006
Ephesians 2.11-22
Christian life is not an identity
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006


When I was in high school, I was a Knight. The Knights was a service club that performed various tasks in the life of the school. The club got points every time it did something. The other service clubs never got nearly as many points, because the Knights had all the main point-getting jobs sewn up. Being a Knight was very cool, and I enjoyed feeling cool.

Well, until the Cavaliers came along. I think the Cavaliers got started by a guy who tried to get into the Knights the same time I did, but he didn’t make the cut for some reason. So he started up the Cavaliers, which required finding a teacher to sponsor them, filling out a form, recruiting some other members and ordering sweaters.

It turns out, the point-getting jobs were not as sewn up as we all thought. Just about anything that did some good for the school could earn points, and the Cavaliers started doing those things, lots and lots of them. By about their second year, they were earning more points than the Knights, and they won whatever it was you win at the end of the school year for getting the most points for performing service.

Suddenly, it was also very cool to be a Cavalier, even though it was still somewhat cool to be a Knight, if not as cool as it was before. Funny, how your feelings about yourself change, depending on what club you belong to and on how your club is looking to the eyes of the world.

Paul was the apostle that didn’t get to join the apostolic club that had everything Christian all sewn up. He hadn’t actually followed Jesus around for three years, like everyone else, for one thing, but for another—this was the main point—Paul had the idea that there were more point-getting activities in Christian life than the original apostles thought there were.

Worse, some of the point-getting things the original apostles believed in, Paul thought, really didn’t get you points at all. Circumcision was one of those. The original apostles thought the least a Greek could do to be a Christian was to get circumcised, because that would make him a genuine Jew, thereby making him eligible to be a genuine Christian. Paul knew and accepted and even insisted that Christian life is a difficult life to choose and live, but he began to see that difficult acts were not valuable for the spiritual life just because they were difficult.

More important, Paul began to see that marking yourself in some way as part of the chosen religious club not only missed the point, it led to spiritual mistakes. Christian life, Paul came to see, is not an identity. Rather, Christian life is a direction, a way of seeing things and a constantly evolving set of choices. It is meaningless to say, “I am a Christian,” which is an identity statement, because the only thing Christian about you is the next thought you have, the next choice you make and the next thing you enact according to your vision of Christ. Circumcision was about identity—about being a religious type—which is pointless, and it was a grave spiritual mistake. That’s what Paul thought, and for that he was not particularly welcome in the old line apostolic club, not at first.

Now, once Paul saw the pointlessness of the religious law about circumcision, he started to see the pointlessness of legalism in any form. Not that there shouldn’t be ways we ought to act and ways we ought not to act, but there’s no permanent set of books and no one-size-fits-all pattern of conduct that could ever be called Christian. Paul came to see that it would never again be so easy to be obedient as to look up the right thing to do and collect your points for doing it.

But now there’s a problem. How do you know what kind of religious person you are, if you don’t have a mark or a kind of conduct to show it? You can tell that a man with a yarmulke on his head is a Jew. You can tell a woman with a khimar scarf on her head is a Muslim, and someone curled up on a prayer rug facing east at certain times of the day is a Muslim, too. Things people wear or do mark who they are, religiously speaking, but what do Christians get to have that shows their religious identity?

That’s the tricky thing, isn’t it? All my childhood and until about my college years, there wasn’t much going on in the way of markers for Christian identity. Then someone woke up one day and thought it would be a great thing if there were markers. There ought to be a way, they believed, to say if you’re a Christian by what you did or what you said or what you wore. That’s when I started seeing Christians with big crosses hanging from their necks, and that simple fish drawing began appearing on notebooks and car bumpers. (If you want to show what you are in modern America, don’t mark your body. Mark your car!)

And there were also suddenly special rules to follow. You had to explain your faith in a certain way, and your prayers started to sound like everyone else’s prayers—“Lord, I just wanna thank you . . .”—so that you really and clearly distinguished yourself not only as a Christian and not some other religious adherent, but also as the right kind of Christian and not the inadequate kind of Christian. This wasn’t snobbery—don’t get me wrong; everybody was “welcome”—but it was a distinct movement toward identity. (I’m sure people were relieved that at least it didn’t involve a medical procedure.)

But to say everyone is welcome is not the same as what Paul says. Paul says that the outcome of Christ’s life and ministry is that there is no longer a religious “dividing wall” between people. It is not, for Paul, a matter of welcoming someone from the other side of the dividing wall coming over to your side of the dividing wall. No, Christ has “broken down the dividing wall.” Of course everyone is welcome. How could they not be welcome? They’re part of the household. They are no longer apart. They are no longer strangers and no longer aliens “with no hope and without God in the world.”

So if I say that I am a Christian, as I sometimes do, it is not to say that I am something that outsiders are not. I am saying that in solidarity with those “who were far off and those who were near”—Jews, Muslims, Baha’i, you name it—I am listening for the proclamation of peace. In my case, I hear peace proclaimed in the voice of Christ, but that does not exclude the peace other ears hear proclaimed by another voice.

I could reject the peace other ears hear proclaimed by other voices. If I believed there were a Christian dividing wall between me and them, I would have to reject other voices of peace. If I saw myself terms of a Christian identity, I would have to declare others outside the household of true peace. We’ve seen where that leads. Timothy McVeigh became part of the growing Christian identity movement, and he simply took the belief in Christianity as an identity to its logical conclusion when he blew the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City to smithereens. There was one right kind of Christian, and the rest were apostates. There was one kind of religion, and the rest were godless and evil. Death for them is not only justified but imperative.

Of course, we don’t think of this sort of thing as Christian at all. The idea of Christian identity is so foreign and objectionable that at the time of the Oklahoma City bombing, no one even considered thinking, “Hey, this sounds like something a Christian would do.” In fact, you may remember, the thing people actually did think and did say—years before 9/11—was, “Hey, this sounds like something an Islamic extremist would do.” Do you remember that? I do, and I remind myself of it every time I hear the phrase “Islamic extremist.”

Islam had nothing to do with Tim McVeigh’s terrorism, just as Christian faith had nothing to do with it, either, and I think we confuse and obscure matters when we call such things what they are not. If I can’t believe that my Christian faith did not cause Tim McVeigh to commit his atrocity, then I must also not believe that Islam caused nineteen angry men to commit the atrocity of 9/11 or that it causes Hamas and Hezbollah to commit atrocities against the Jewish, and Muslim, citizens of Haifa or that Judaism causes Israeli political leaders to commit the even more vast and deadly atrocities against the Lebanese people. Religious identity—that alluring, dangerous and so very human need to declare myself inside and others outside the household of God—religious identity, carried to its logical end, is what casts the vision of peace as a reward only for the winners of war, and it is what causes the endless atrocities we have been watching on television.

So when you call yourself Christian, be careful to know what you mean and to convey your meaning with the kind of openness and grace that breaks down dividing walls. The word itself—“Christian”—is constructed to help you do this. When in the book of Acts, the followers of Christ at Antioch were first given their name, the name they were given was “Christ” but with the diminutive ending: Little Christ. Christ-ian would come out in something like Christito or Christita in Spanish—Little Christ. You are a manifestation of Christ in this hour. You are a living moment of Christ in world history. You are a flickering light of Christ in this darkness. You are a gracious voice of Christ in these anxious days. You are a fragrant breeze of Christ through a toxic atmosphere.

To say you are Christian, the way Paul means it, is never to say you are a category. Rather, to be Christian is to enact the life that is Christ, the life that breaks down dividing walls, the life that abolishes legalism “with its commandments and ordinances,” that you might become with the whole world, as Paul says, “one new humanity instead of two, thus making peace.” [v. 15]

Let me speak to you personally. It is hard to know when I am teaching a wider truth of faith for us all to understand and when I am only telling you about the faith I myself must live by. I will be honest with you. I feel the hostility of the world so personally and so deeply that I hurt every day, even when the hostility toward me is misdirected and even when the hostility of the world has nothing to do with me at all. I simply feel it, and it hurts, I imagine, in a very slight way the way it hurts Jesus. The cross of Christ could not mean that Christians stand beside a dividing wall that creates perpetual warfare—frequently metaphorical, but too often tragically literal. So it is impossible for me to feel that I stand behind a dividing wall against most of the rest of the world, the part of the world that does not confess Christ. This dividing wall can, for a time, make the rest of the world an opportunity to bring all peoples over to my side of the wall, but this will not happen. Anyone can see that the whole world is not going to convert to Christianity.

So, eventually, a Christian dividing wall makes the rest of the world my enemy, and I believe I would die, literally, if I had to believe in it. I simply would not survive to a natural end in a world where my vision of God required enmity between myself and most of the world. I don’t want to live in a world—I cannot live in one—that is an extension of the competition of my high school’s clubs. The world cannot be a division between Christians and heathens, the way high school service was a division between Knights and Cavaliers. Curiously enough, in fact, I looked up cavalier in the dictionary, and do you know what it says? The definition of a cavalier is—get this—a knight. They are the same thing, just different names. A combatant is a combatant, by whatever name you give it. I would die if, ultimately, we were all combatants on the basis of our beliefs and convictions.

But Christ “came and proclaimed peace to [those] who were far off and to those who were near,” and that is a vision I can live by. I cannot live by a vision that says there are two kinds of people in the world—my kind and everyone else—but I can live by a vision that says there are two ways I can live my life. I can live my life in a religious identity that separates and alienates me from the rest of the world God loves, or I can live my life by a vision of grace in which I enact the peace of Christ in the worldwide embrace of God’s love. Because of Jesus, this latter life of peace is what I have chosen.

So we are just about to sing Lift high the cross, which in one way seems incongruous—raising the banner of our side of the dividing wall to distinguish ourselves—but the very words make things come out otherwise: “Each newborn servant of the Crucified / bears on the brow the seal of Christ who died.” The Lord’s symbol of holy defeat becomes the seal on our forehead that undoes any separation between the follower of Christ and the world God loves. There are no strangers or aliens, only “citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God.” Amen.

July 5, 2006 - This generous undertaking

13th Sunday in Ordinary Time
2 July 2006
Psalm 9.9-20; 2 Corinthians 8.7-15
This generous undertaking
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006

Democracy excelled as a form of governance upon the founding of our nation, beginning with the Declaration of Independence in 1776. For once, a regional populace believed in its ability to govern itself without a monarchy, and independent of any outside government. The populace decided that individual human beings have an inalienable claim to certain rights, like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. When the populace actually became independent, it wrote a constitution, agreeing that individual human beings could make the decisions needed to govern themselves. They decided to do it by voting for their own leaders who would make and enforce the laws they’d live by, and that’s what we’re still doing, today.

Now, maybe some of the people who created a nation from that constitution thought they had the perfect plan for our nation, but I don’t know who they’d have been. To judge from all the arguing at the constitutional conventions, you’d have to conclude that everyone ended up with at least something in the plan for the nation that looked imperfect to them. The Bill of Rights, our Constitution’s first ten improvements, are glaring evidence that the founders considered its inadequacies serious enough to require at least ten amendments in order for it to work. We’ve been improving on it ever since.

One kind of ongoing improvement has had to do with who counts as a real person—who, in other words, counts as enough of a person to be allowed to vote. At first, it only seemed fair that all white males who owned land should be able to vote. But then in 1841, a Rhode Island legislator named Thomas Dorr asked, “Hey, what does owning land have to do with it?” And after a while, almost all the white males over 21 could vote.

Then in 1848, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton got some women together in Seneca Falls, NY, and asked, “Hey, what does being male have to do with it?” And after a long, long while—not until the 19th amendment in 1920—almost all white people over 21 could vote.

Then, after Abraham Lincoln declared African-Americans free, someone said, “Hey, what does being white have to do with it?” African-Americans didn’t have to wait as long as women, and in 1868 and 1870, we got the 14th and 15th amendments, which gave them the vote.

Personally, while I agree that the founders of our nation excelled in their founding of it, what I really believe is great about our nation is that, over the generations, we have found ways to excel beyond the imaginations of those founders. Imagine if we’d never grown in these and many other ways. Our nation would stand out as among the most backwards, intolerant countries of the world. All but two Arab democracies would see us and say, “Look at America, they don’t even let women vote.” [Kuwaiti women voted for the first time just last Thursday.]

Imagine that. But women can vote in America, along with African-Americans and people who don’t own any land. All citizens who haven’t committed felonies get to vote. We’ve grown as a nation and changed. Growth and change have given all those people the right to vote, along with many other rights and privileges that belong to all of us, because the growth and change of our government and society have made expanded rights possible.

So does the church, the apostle Paul reminds us, grow and change. “Now as you excel in everything,” he says to the Corinthian church, “so we want you to excel also in this generous undertaking.” The particular undertaking was apparently to provide material assistance to some churches living in straitened circumstances. It seems to me that everything the church does for the sake of others on behalf of God is a generous undertaking. If it isn’t, I can’t imagine it could be on God’s behalf. Everything we have from God is for our abundant life of grace. That is God’s generosity, and it’s why faith is generous, too.

So Paul exhorts the Corinthians: “I am testing the genuineness of your love against the earnestness of others.” That’s pressure, comparing the genuineness of your love to other people’s earnestness. Who is Paul to make such judgments?

But Paul thinks it’s his job to pressure people, whether they like it or not. The Corinthians, it would seem, already didn’t like it. In the beginning of this second letter from Paul, he spends a lot of column space ruminating on his strained relationship with the church in Corinth. Oh, he starts off with all the usual “grace and peace to you” niceties that make us warm all over to read, but by the end of the chapter he’s acknowledging his rather overbearing style by trying to convince the Corinthians he’s not really trying to “lord it over” them. He explains in the second chapter that he decided not to pay them an announced visit because of the pain his presence would cause. There’s a lot of tension in the church already, just a generation after the cross, and yet all Paul can think of to do is push through the tension, awkwardness, pain and discouragement of divisions in which he seems so often to be embroiled.

So the body of the faithful has always been startled by sparks of contention, just as America’s political life has always been ignited by sparks of controversy. Maybe that’s why fireworks are the one reliable feature of every July 4th celebration. We just like it better when the fireworks don’t go off in our hands.

That’s the thing, though, about church life, when it’s vital, on the move, growing and changing: Sometimes the fireworks do go off in your hands. For in the church, fireworks come in the form of ideas—ideas about who God is, what justice means, what love requires and how faithful action looks to people. High-powered and quality ideas are the skyrockets that will blaze in the night for all to see, which means that they are by nature dangerous to handle. Paul wrote letters. He lit the fuses of spiritual ideas with his stationery, and those ideas are still singeing the tips of our fingers whenever we hold one of his letters long enough to understand the power of what they really mean.

Some of us sat around last week after church and talked about ideas we have and ideas we hear and ideas we keep a lid on, for fear of their explosive power. We started having these meetings last year. People in these meetings set their ideas out for others to inspect, and sometimes you can see that if one idea was going to be launched into the sky it means that another idea would have to be put back in the box. You can’t send up both ideas in the same hour of worship, or even the same kind of church. So that’s different—people talking about ideas they have about the church, ideas that don’t necessarily go together, and figuring that saying their ideas out loud was better than not saying them, no matter what happens next, even if what happens next goes boom.

It’s easy by now to see what advice Paul would give at this point: “In this matter I am giving my advice: it is appropriate for you who began last year not only to do something but even to desire to do something—now finish doing it, so that your eagerness may be matched by completing it.” Finish the conversation. Complete the circle.

Take the conversation from the starting point of mutually exclusive ideas and work those ideas around to their logical conclusion. One idea that came up last week is that the fate of our planet is a responsibility for Christians and should be addressed to them. Another idea is that Christian responsibility should not be addressed to Christians by their leaders, and so the fate of the planet should be left either to the change that Christians will either spontaneously assume responsibility or simply leave others to be responsible. A third idea is for Christian leaders to lead by describing the problem and the options but not lead by teaching what they believe is right. These three options cannot be done at the same time, and our Christian community has begun a conversation about the relative value of each option. The congregation has begun this conversation. All Paul would say is, “Now finish doing it.”

Now, I realize that to many people of the sort that come to our Presbyterian churches this sounds like not very much fun. It sounds downright unpleasant. It sounds like an invitation to endless bickering and the kind of irresoluble set of differences that have beset the denomination for decades—like the issues of sexuality that keep festering, the more we try to settle them. But I promise you, this working on the difficult questions of the life of the church truly is the sort of thing Paul describes as a “generous undertaking.”

Really, we already know this. We’ve long been dealing faithfully with controversial issues, and to great effect. You already know this. Housing for the poor and disadvantaged is a controversial issue in our society. Just look at the raging debate surrounding the restoration of public housing in New Orleans. But the membership of First Presbyterian Church has taken a clear an unequivocal a stand that inadequate housing for low-income households is morally wrong. We devote our money, our time, our resources and our voice to the work of Habitat for Humanity, and we don’t care who knows it, because our Christian political position is that everybody deserves a decent house to live in—and not just Americans, and not just Christians, but every person on this planet.

What else? Health care. The current health care system in America provides for treatment of those wealthy enough to have insurance or to pay their own medical bills. Under the leadership of Margie Porter, First Presbyterian Church has spoken. This situation is morally wrong, and we have taken an unequivocal stand. We devote our money, our time, our resources and our voice to the work of the Good Shepherd Health Clinic for those excluded by the American health care system, and we don’t care who knows it, because our Christian political position is that everybody deserves adequate health care.

These are generous undertakings. They are not only generous because they depend on our wealth and sweat and time; they are generous because they depend on our moral courage, our credibility as Christians, our sincerity and our earnestness. If Paul were testing “the genuineness of [our] love against the earnestness of others,” we’d pass with flying colors.

This generous undertaking that First Presbyterian Church is about—the undertaking to support and sustain the unnoticed and underserved, the vulnerable and sometimes even the vilified—this generous undertaking our church is about both draws more energy and gives more energy to us than just about any other spiritual motivation the Bible talks about, though between the prophets and the teaching of Jesus, it’s hard to think of anything the Bible talks about more.

Now, that’s a congregation that has been willing to grow and change, and its growth and change overflow in generous undertakings that extend works of love and grace to people who long for the abundance God longs to give them. The wide mission of this congregation envisions the generous undertaking of work for the sake of those God sees but the world ignores, those God knows but the world forgets, those God loves but the world despises. You start ministries of that character in a church, and you sometimes get fireworks. If you don’t, you should, because the worldly side of us wants to fight when the godly side of us acts with revolutionary faith.

This is who we are. This who we’re going to be, if we’re going to be faithful to what God made us to be—faithful to the heart that has been beating within this congregation for generations, now. Our community regularly looks toward us for the kind of moral courage that we keep showing, and can keep showing, if only we can continue to believe in being the people God has already made us to be.

Every now and then we sort of go to sleep and get comfortable with all the revolutionary things we’ve been doing, having domesticated them, but every now and then, out of the depths of some soul among us, someone wakes up and says, “Oh, no. No, our soul is not free; there is an injustice in the world. There is a beloved of God somewhere going unloved by us.” And it is our duty to say out loud that something’s wrong and needs to be changed. Then, just as the founders of our nation did, every now and then one of us and then a few of us and then the rest of us will rise up and say, “This is what has to happen now, and this is what we’re going to do about it.

And the revolution continues. Amen.