| The Christian
Life: Sanctified or Sanctimonious? Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis October 27, 2002, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 1:7-20 "He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, 'Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.'" I have always been an avid reader of obituaries. It is not that I am Ishmael, perpetually finding myself with some damp, drizzly November in my soul; involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet. Rather the practice has to do with an insatiable curiosity about what constitutes a life well lived. Mostly such lives do not make the Inquirer or the Times, though sometimes the details of such a life do receive mention. I especially remember an obituary in the New York Times that began, "Dr. Jan Jakob Smulewicz died of heart failure in New York last week at the age of 69. He was not famous." Smulewicz had survived three death sentences in the concentrations camps and came to this country from Israel in 1957, where he "taught, wrote about medicine and revamped the radiology departments of three hospitals. He also helped those further down the medical ladder," the obituary goes on, "encouraging orderlies to become doctors and cleaners to become technicians, and founded a program at Harlem Hospital to help local youths become X-ray technicians." The obituary concluded, "Dr. Jan Jakob Smulewicz, of southeast Poland, Germany, Israel and Manhattan, lived a life worth noting not so much because he survived unimaginable horrors but because he gave meaning to his survival." Then across my screen on Friday came the obituary of one just fallen from the sky, Paul Wellstone, who said of a stand taken that could hurt him politically, "What would really hurt is if I were giving speeches and I didn't even believe what I was saying…if people thought I was doing something just for political reasons." This and the memory of "an evening when he came back to the Capitol well past midnight to visit with the cleaning staff and tell them how much he appreciated their efforts," undo me as I read. "I think that the dying pray at the last not 'please' but 'thank you,' as a guest thanks a host at the door. Falling from airplanes," says Annie Dillard, "the people are crying thank you, thank you all down the air." I have yet to come upon rules for such a life as these-the Ten Commandments notwithstanding--only the conviction that you will know such a life when you see it. I read the obituaries because I need word that such lives are, in fact, still dared. "One must live the life that is given to one to live [by God]" wrote Glenn Tinder, "and must do this without depending on the sanction of any other person or any group. One must do this, moreover, without assurance that sanction, or recognition, will come in time. To live lucidly without honor is to accept not only the state of being ignored, but the prospect of being everlastingly forgotten." There is a doctrine at the foundation of the Christian life for those of us who would claim the Reformed tradition as our own, a doctrine which has to do with the life given us to live by God. The doctrine is the doctrine of sanctification. Mostly of a Reformation Sunday, preachers are prone to proclaim the gospel with reference to Luther's doctrine of justification by faith: that we are saved by grace [brought into a life-giving relationship to God] through faith, and this is not our own doing, but a gift of God. This was the doctrine that turned church history inside out. Yet on this Reformation Sunday, when the human condition and character has shown itself to be more fallen and broken than we can bear, I want, nevertheless, to consider the doctrine without which the doctrine of justification by faith falls into cheap grace: the Reformed doctrine of sanctification. This is the belief that the Christian is not only a forgiven person but an ethical person, that the elect person is called to a life of service and obedience. By this doctrine, the monasteries were closed, the cloisters shut down and Christians sent into the world to discern what they should be and do as followers of Jesus Christ. I tell you, this doctrine not only turned church history but Western civilization on its ear! The idea is that we are to live lives in gratitude for what God has done for us, in response to the love God has made known to us in Jesus Christ and in obedience to the will of God for human life revealed in his life, death and resurrection. Under the heading of sanctification, you find discussions of discipleship, of repentance and conversion, of good works, and of the cross. For good and ill, the doctrine has marked Presbyterians as people who "should approve their Christianity by a life of holiness," a life "growing up to perfection," said Calvin, a life in conformity to God's will. Calvin was so concerned that the reformed doctrine of justification by faith would become an excuse for moral license and sloth--that persons who suddenly believed themselves to be freely pardoned would do as they pleased--he placed the doctrine of sanctification before the doctrine of justification in his Institutes of the Christian Religion. He was brilliant in his theological balance of these two foundational beliefs. "The faithful," he wrote, "are never reconciled to God without the gift of sanctification, yea, to this end are we justified, that afterward we might worship God in holiness of life." In other words, it does not matter a damn if you are forgiven unless forgiveness leads to a life lived in obedience to the God for whom you were made and to whom you have been turned by grace. Calvin's followers were not so brilliant on balance. You can already see the disaster waiting to happen, can foresee the sanctimony inevitably rooted in sanctification! To be sanctimonious, says Webster, is to pretend to be very holy or pious. It is how people act around ministers and it is an act minister have perfected to a fault! Whatever holiness looks like, good Christians have concluded, this is the persona I must put on-if not inside out, then at least on the outside, for all the world to see. The persona often becomes so well perfected that we begin not only to believe the pretense ourselves, but believe we alone are responsible for the good life we so perfectly live! Collectively in the church, this has taken Christians down the straight and narrow path of legalism, the belief that the Christian life is simply a new set of rules which, when followed by those who can will themselves to behave, make us "good" in God's eye; or has found many a believer exhibiting a self-righteousness unbecoming to sinners saved by grace alone, a pride that my behavior places me, in relation to others, on moral high ground with God; or has landed whole denominations in the lap of obscurantism, "when the will of God is prematurely identified with some human pattern of conduct." A sanctimonious bunch we can so easily become! Hence roars Paul a multiple times in his letters, "'Let those who boast, boast in the Lord.'" Paul is writing to the early church already full of legalists in Galatia, antinomianists in Corinth, self-righteous Gentiles in Rome and obscurantists in Jerusalem. "He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus,'" he writes to them all "who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption," thus turning us to see in Jesus Christ what the life we are given to live finally looks like. But here is the curious thing: Paul knew practically nothing of the life and teachings of Jesus. He was not writing to construct an ethic based on Jesus' words or action. He knew only "Christ crucified." An obituary of the man Jesus this was not. Rather Christ's death on a cross, and what that revealed of God's love, signaled Paul's death to his old self and the beginning of his new life in Christ [sanctification!], a life lived to Christ and not himself. Of this life in Christ, says Dietrich Bonhoeffer, we are given "no intelligible programme for a way of life, no goal or ideal to strive after. It is not a cause which human calculation might deem worthy of our devotion, even the devotion of ourselves….The old life is left behind, and completely surrendered. The disciple is dragged out of relative security into a life of absolute insecurity…from a life which is observable and calculable…into a life where everything is unobservable and fortuitous, out of the realm of finite…into the realm of infinite possibilities." What follows is an obituary of a different order: word that in Christ we have died to the self we have so masterfully constructed for the world's view, the self we have spent our ego promoting or even the self spent on its own insecurities, the self whose days have been taken with becoming somebody of consequence and the self whose nights have tossed and turned in fear of failure, the self whose waking moments are obsessed with the self even in these highest moments of altruism acted out for all to see! In him, the person we have become on our own without him dies, because with him the humanity for which we were made is given life that is life. Now we belong not to ourselves, but to the One who gave his life for us that we might really live! Therefore writes Luther as if the word were Christ's, "Discipleship is not limited to what you can comprehend--it must transcend all comprehension. Plunge into the deep waters beyond your own comprehension, and I will help you to comprehend even as I do. Bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not to know where you are going is the true knowledge. My comprehension transcends yours. Thus Abraham went forth from his father and not knowing whither he went. He trusted himself to my knowledge, and cared not for his own, and thus he took the right road and came to his journey's end. Behold, that is the way of the cross. You cannot find it yourself, so you must let me lead you as though you were blind…. Wherefore it is not you, no [human being], no creature, but I myself, who instruct you by my word and Spirit in the way you should go. Not the work which you choose, not the suffering you devise, but the road which is clean contrary to all that you choose or contrive or desire-that is the road you must take. To that I call you, and in that you must be my disciple." We are hurting for holiness, these days, my friends. We are scouring the obituaries for word of a life well lived. We are susceptible to every hyped holy man down the road whose sanctimony suckers us into following…when there is only one to follow: He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God and righteous and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, 'Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.'" Thanks be to God! |